RESCUING THE 'WAIFS AND STRAYS' OF THE CITY: THE WESTERN EMIGRATION PROGRAM OF THE CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY.

Edwin Schlossberg Inc.

"The great majority of our little emigrants," claimed Charles Loring Brace, "are the 'waifs and strays' of the streets in a large city." When the Children's Aid Society opened its doors in March 1853, according to Brace, a "crowd of wandering little ones" immediately found their way to the small office on Amity Street. "Ragged young girls who had nowhere to lay their heads; children driven from drunkards' homes; orphans who slept where they could find a box or a stairway; boys cast out by step-mothers or step-fathers; newsboys, whose incessant answer to our question 'Where do you live?' rung in our ears, 'Don't live nowhere!'"(1)

The Children's Aid Society of New York (CAS) was the pre-eminent child-saving organization of the nineteenth century; its emigration program, one of the most influential, far-reaching, and controversial programs in the child-saving movement. Charles Loring Brace, founder and first director of CAS, envisioned emigration as the linchpin for all of the organization's efforts on behalf of New York's poor children. The mission of the emigration program was the removal of as many poor children as possible from the "contaminating influence" of their families to "good Christian homes" in the Midwest. During Brace's tenure as director, from 1853 to 1890, he claimed to have personally supervised the

relocation of over ninety thousand individuals under the auspices of this program.

CAS's emigration program and the experiences of the people who participated in the program provide a window into the origin and development of social welfare policies. The modern conception of foster care evolved directly from this program. So, too, did many of the attitudes and conflicts associated with the modern welfare system. CAS assigned to itself powers over its clientele that had never before been exercised by a charitable organization, and which subsequent child-saving organizations would emulate. CAS stood in loco parentis over all of the children in the emigration program. The sheer scale of the emigration program and the complexity of its organizational structure were also departures from traditional charitable work. No organization previously had attempted to serve a client population that numbered in the tens of thousands. To operate the program efficiently, CAS developed innovative organizational methods still employed by modern social service agencies, such as using salaried caseworkers instead of volunteers, maintaining client case records, and conducting home visits to assess need and to provide ongoing supervision.

Each year in CAS's Annual Report, the emigration program received star billing in Brace's account of the agency's progress. In Brace's melodramatic script, foster families played the roles of guardian angels who rescued "waifs" from the temptations of the city and from villainous parents. He placed enormous faith in the ameliorative potential of the rural home, which combined ideals about the virtues of domesticity with romantic notions about the frontier. Brace avowed, "The peculiar warm-heartedness of the Western people, and the equality of all classes, give them an especial adaptation to this work, and account for their success." Foster parents' patient guidance, Brace believed, would develop the children's character, breaking a chain of "hereditary pauperism" and transforming the city's potentially "dangerous classes" into productive citizens. A child placed in such a home, Brace exulted, did not feet he was a servant, employee, or charity case, but rather a member of "a little Christian family."(2) Brace's enthusiastic reports on the success of the emigration program spurred the development of similar placing-out programs in Brooklyn, Boston, and Philadelphia, as well as many smaller cities across the country. Brace's work had an impact on the child-saving movement in Europe as well, encouraging the placement of urban children in rural homes.(3)

Brace and his motives for creating the emigration program have long sparked debate in the historical literature on nineteenth-century social reform. Discussion centers on questions of social benevolence versus social control, with Brace and the emigration program presented as outstanding examples in support of one or the other view. Scholars present Brace as either the father of modern foster care or as the principal architect and popularizer of a social policy aimed at breaking up working-class families.

Proponents of a social benevolence interpretation of the child-saving movement applaud Brace's actions. These historians argue that child-savers positively changed the position of the child within the family and society, from one based on the child's instrumental advantage to adults to one in which the child's needs come first. In this view, reformers' intervention in family life is justified since children's needs and welfare are at stake. Welfare historian Walter I. Trattnor, for example, regards Brace with admiration for being among the first to offer a modern view of public responsibility for child welfare. Similarly, Robert Bremner credits Brace with having a "wholesome influence" on later developments in the field of social welfare, especially through his promotion of foster care and his stance against the incarceration of children in reformatories. Urban historian Thomas Bender credits Brace as an urban visionary, eager to heal the divisions between classes through CAS's social service programs. Marilyn Holt's recent work on the placing-out programs operated by CAS and its many imitators argues that CAS's emigration program accomplished a great deal of social good. In Holt's view, Brace rescued children from certain poverty in the city and gave them opportunities that would otherwise have been closed to them.(4)

In contrast to these upbeat accounts, advocates of a social control thesis argue that Brace tried to destroy working-class families to reinforce the capitalist hierarchy. For example, Michael Katz, in In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, argues that nineteenth-century reform efforts, particularly the breakup of poor families, "reflected the brittle hostility and anger of the respectable classes and their horror at the prospect of a united, militant working class." Katz blames Brace for making family disruption an acceptable policy in social work. In the same vein, Ann Vanderpol argues that CAS routinely violated the integrity of working-class families with complete impunity. The invasion of privacy destroyed the working-class family's autonomy, weakening it as an agent of resistance. Even Paul Boyer, who holds a generally positive view of Brace, claims Brace sent youths far from the city and their families because he feared their potential for collective action.(5)

This paper contends that scholars on either side of the social control-social benevolence debate rely too readily on reformers' rhetoric as evidence of actions, and interpret intentions as results. Whether an optimistic or pessimistic reading of CAS, these are selective readings that take Brace too literally. Both sides may be right - or wrong - but they do nothing to illuminate the experiences of the children who took part in the emigration program. Regardless of the motives historians ascribe to Brace and other social reformers, these historical models grant reformers virtually unlimited power in society and over the working class. To test this assumption, historians must compare reformers' words and actions, policies and practices, to the actual experiences of the people who participated in these social programs.

Over a decade ago Bruce Bellingham began to challenge these assumptions in regard to Brace and CAS in his study on the first two years of CAS's emigration program. Examining CAS's case records for 1853 and 1854, Bellingham found that most of CAS's young clients did not need foster homes, but used the emigration program as a means of entry into the labor force. Within a few years, the majority of youths returned to New York.(6) While the first two years of the emigration program laid the foundation for the program's policies and procedures, Brace claimed that a lack of financial resources prevented CAS from fully meeting his objectives. The emigration program did not hit full steam until after the Civil War [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].

To fully grasp the significance of the emigration program, we must know how the program functioned in its prime with an organizational and financial structure firmly in place. More importantly, the interaction between CAS and its clientele warrants careful examination. Was the relationship between reformers and the working class a one-sided imposition of power and values, or was it more dynamic and dialectic? Were working-class parents and children passive victims or active participants in their own fates? How did children and their families experience the foster placement program?

This study attempts to answer these questions by looking at CAS's emigration program over four decades, from 1853, the year it was founded, to 1890, the year Brace died. An examination of client case records and journals kept by CAS caseworkers (who were called "agents") yielded narrative and statistical information on children's lives before and after foster placement, and on the day-to-day interaction between clients and staff. A random sample of the case records provided information on 1,084 individuals who went through intake at the offices of the Children's Aid Society during these years. Of this number, only 432 individuals proved to be children CAS placed in foster homes. The case records of these 432 children form the core of this study.(7)

The case records revealed that few children in the sample fit the profile of homeless, neglected, or abused "waifs" that Brace liked to publicize. Though each child's story was unique, the children in CAS's foster placement program generally fell into three broad groupings. One group consisted of young orphaned or abandoned children, who came to CAS's attention through relatives or through another social institution, such as an orphanage. CAS found permanent homes for these dependent children and monitored their progress until they came of age. These children made up less than one-quarter (21.3 percent) of those in the emigration program. Parents or other relatives brought a second group to CAS for temporary placement during some type of family crisis, and retrieved them when the crisis passed. Family crisis appeared as a reason for placement in 17.1 percent of the case records. Youths seeking entry into the labor force made up the third and largest group in the program (55.5 percent). This group came into the office on their own or with a parent, having heard about the emigration program from one of CAS's staff, at a lodging house, or from friends who had gone West and liked it. Figure 2 gives a breakdown of the emigrants by age. It is clear from this breakdown that older youths, 14 to 17 years of age, dominated the program. (Note: The reason for placement was not given in 6.1 percent of the cases.)

A comparison of the statistics taken from CAS's Annual Reports (the public record) and the case records (the private record) also uncovered a sharp discrepancy. CAS's published figures for the emigration program are misleading, because not all of the ninety thousand-plus emigrants sent to the Midwest were actually children under CAS's supervision. As Table 1 shows, of the 1,084 persons in the sample, CAS actually placed only 40 percent in foster homes. With the exception of the Civil Wars years, families - parents accompanied by their children - consistently made up over half of those in the emigration program. Of the remaining children, in almost one out of ten cases, CAS simply sent the children to family members already in the West. Another 3 percent were young people who elected not to go at the last minute.

As will be seen, Brace not only painted an inaccurate picture of those who participated in the emigration program, but, by focusing solely on children, he also obscured the active, decision-making role played by the children's families. The decision to emigrate was generally a family decision, not an individual one. The following sections show that families used CAS's emigration program as an extension of strategies the working class had long employed to ease family turmoil in times of crisis, to strengthen the family economy, and to smooth young people's transition from the home into the world.

Table 1

Emigration Program Sample

                           N          %

Boys placed by CAS        373       34.4
Girls placed by CAS        59        5.4
Men                       121       11.2
Women                     128       11.8
Children with             333       30.7
their parents
Children sent to           38        3.5
relatives
Did not go                 32        3

TOTAL                    1084      100

Dependent Children

Death or desertion of a parent left many young children dependent upon and in need of the protection of some charitable person or institution. The most common practice for dealing with dependent children in the mid-nineteenth century was placing them in a residential institution, such as an orphanage. Brace was an outspoken critic of this practice, because he believed an asylum housing thousands of children could not achieve what he considered to be the primary objective of both reform and child-rearing - the development of character. Asylums, he asserted, "breed a species of character which is monastic - indolent, unused to struggle; subordinate indeed, but with little independence and manly vigor." Only in the bosom of a "good" Christian (i.e., Protestant) family could a child develop the traits of character required for a productive adulthood.(8)

While the number of dependent children never approached the majority Brace claimed for the emigration program, this group did represent an important and substantial minority. The median age for children in this category was nine years old. Dependent boys outnumbered girls three to one; many of the case records show that families were reluctant to place girls in strangers' homes. About half of these dependent children were orphans; the other half had one parent living, usually a mother. Most of these young orphans and half-orphans - about 83 percent - came to GAS from residential institutions. Another ten percent had been living with only a mother, who could no longer support her child.

Few working-class children in nineteenth-century New York could expect to reach adulthood without losing at least one parent. In the 1850s, New York's mortality rate surpassed that of London and of Paris. By 1865, population densities in some neighborhoods in the city exceeded that of London's worst districts. Severe overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and successive waves of epidemics all took their toll, especially in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods.(9)

The death of a wife and mother upset the precarious economic balance that existed in most working-class homes. The family lost not only the money the wife earned from paid out-work, but also her unpaid contributions to the family economy. A man left alone with young children faced financial and logistical problems in raising them. Unless there was an older daughter to assume the mother's child care and household duties, a father had to hire domestic help, pay to board his children, or leave them alone while he worked.(10) Given the options available to them, some men found foster care through CAS a good choice for their children.

Loss of a male breadwinner, whether through death or desertion, was virtually synonymous with impoverishment. A woman alone, especially one with children too young to earn much toward their keep, faced enormous, often unendurable, economic hardships. Widows and their dependent children constituted the core of public relief rolls throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Desertion, the working-man's "divorce" in the nineteenth century, left many other women struggling to scrape together a livelihood for themselves and their children.(11)

A case in point was that of a Mrs. Wyeth, a widow with six children, who in 1853 asked one of CAS's agents, E.P. Smith, to find places for four or five of her children. She was especially anxious that her two youngest, a boy of six and a girl of four, be adopted. Smith took a special interest in the family, probably because he considered Mrs. Wyeth, a native-born Protestant as well as a poor widow, to be very worthy of charitable assistance. She certainly needed assistance. Smith observed that she was "not healthy and cannot clothe and feed so many." In two weeks' time, Smith found a family in the city who wanted to adopt the little girl, and arranged to send two of the boys, aged eight and ten, to a farmer in Illinois.(12)

When both parents in a family died, relatives, friends, or neighbors usually stepped in and cared for the children. Many of the case records for orphaned children, particularly those who came to CAS as adolescents, note that the child had lived with relatives or friends since a parent's death. If the extended family could not afford to take in an additional child, they placed the youngster in a residential institution. With the development of the CAS emigration program, foster care became a viable option for relatives and family friends left with responsibility for others' children. For example, when Mrs. Weiss, a German widow, died in 1890, relatives assumed responsibility for her four orphaned children. Mrs. Weiss's relatives decided to raise the two girls themselves, but brought the two boys to CAS for placement. CAS found a home for the boys, seven- year-old Charles and five-year-old August, with a Mrs. Kessler in Geneva, Nebraska. Mrs. Kessler adopted both children and raised them as her own. When Mrs. Kessler died in 1900, one of CAS's western agents visited Charles and August. He informed the New York office that the boys, "nice sturdy lads," had been well provided for in Mrs. Kessler's will and would be fine.(13)

Family Crisis or Transition

Foster placement through CAS became another strategy available to families during times of crisis. Though Brace hoped to effect a permanent break between parents and children, families often used the emigration program as a temporary relief measure. Economic hardship, illness, parents' separation, resettlement from one part of the country to another, and conflicts between parents and children created situations in which placement of children seemed critical.

A number of recent studies on residential institutions for children in European and American cities during the nineteenth century have found that destitute parents often used these institutions as a shelter for their children during times of duress, and later reclaimed them.(14) CAS's case records reaffirm this pattern of families "abandoning" children to residential institutions, and later retrieving them. In fact, many families turned to foster placement because it seemed a far better, more rewarding alternative for their children than institutionalization. Prior to coming to CAS, many children spent some period of time in residential institutions. Charles Lake, for example, was in and out of the Randall's Island Nursery during the six years of his mother's prolonged illness. When Mrs. Lake died in 1881, her sister took nine-year-old Charles home to live with her. Four years later, Charles's aunt brought the adolescent to CAS to find work for him on a farm in the West.(15)

Poverty, though a constant for all of the families served by CAS, at times became more severe, such as when a parent lost a job or could not work due to ill health. Economic hardship motivated many parents to bring their children to CAS for temporary foster care. For example, in 1855, a tailor named Reichardt found so little work that he could barely feed his family. Seeing no other alternative, he agreed to send his eleven-year-old daughter Emily to a foster home. Two years later, when his financial situation improved, Reichardt brought his daughter home to New York.(16)

Resettlement - particularly moving West - was another major reason families turned to CAS for temporary foster placement of children. Three cases from 1863 illustrate how families used CAS's emigration program to help them through this transition. In the first case, a Mrs. McDougal brought her three young children, Charles, Elizabeth, and Maria, to CAS for foster placement while she tried to find a job and a home in Chicago. Once settled, Mrs. McDougal went to Indiana, where CAS had placed the children, to get her children and bring them home with her to Chicago.(17) Similarly, when the Boughton family moved from New York to Indiana, they brought their children, Sarah and George, to CAS for temporary placement. Six months later, Mr. and Mrs. Boughton contacted the foster families and took their children back.(18) In the third case, a Mr. Troutman traveled to Michigan in the same CAS company as his sons. He had CAS place his sons, William and George, in foster homes while he found work and built a home for them. A year after their arrival in Michigan, this father took his boys to live with him in their new home.(19)

Young Men Seeking Work

Family changes of a less cataclysmic nature brought the majority of young people to CAS. In particular, working-class families used CAS's emigration program to ease young people's transition from home to the market place. This, too, was part of a family economic strategy. Over half of the young people in the emigration program came to CAS in search of work. Some came into CAS offices, having heard of the program through friends and acquaintances. CAS agents actively recruited others from the streets and tenement houses. Others came from one of CAS's lodging houses, where staff strongly encouraged the young boarders to go West.

Though Brace and his colleagues publicly promoted placing-out for those under the age of fourteen, claiming them to be the ones who would benefit from (i.e., be transformed by) foster placement, almost half of the emigrants (48 percent) were adolescent boys between fourteen and seventeen. Another 8 percent were not children at all, but young adults, eighteen to twenty-one years old [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. These adolescents and young men applied to go; Brace acceded to their wishes. Brace referred to these youths as "large boys," and occasionally made reference to CAS's difficulties in keeping track of them after the agency placed them.(20)

The transfer of youths from one household to another was hardly novel with CAS's emigration program. In fact, the program succeeded in attracting adolescent males because it built on social structures favorable to this group that were already in place. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, young men commonly experienced a semi-independent stage in the life cycle, in which they left their parents' homes to live with other families as boarders or, more and more rarely, apprentices. Living in a family setting provided a young person with companionship, material comforts, and adult supervision, though a less complete supervision than that imposed by parents. This semi-independent phase generally lasted until marriage, at which point the young man established his own household. Mid-western farmers, like their urban counterparts, took in adolescents for economic reasons. While urban families took in boarders for cash, farmers needed the young emigrants' labor to help turn the prairie into profitable farmland.(21)

CAS's emigration program served the same purpose as boarding out, facilitating a stage of semi-autonomy. Adolescents lived with a family, receiving room and board, companionship and guidance, in exchange for their labor. In some cases, a young man received a small wage, a few livestock, or the promise of a stake when he was ready to strike out on his own. CAS's western agents generally supervised the placement of younger teens during the years of semi-independence. CAS also found work for older, already independent adolescents, but in these cases did not maintain a guardianship role.

William Wootten was typical of the young men who came to CAS in the hope of getting a better job in the West. William, fifteen, lived with his parents in Brooklyn, and did odd jobs at the Brooklyn Children's Aid Society. After hearing the CAS agents' stories promoting the West, William decided that he would like to go. CAS sent him to Belleville, Kansas in 1885 to work for a man named Collins. The young man wrote colorful letters home to his parents about his work on the farm. In one letter he urged them to "come to the land of plenty."(22)

While some young people made the decision alone to go West, more often it was a family decision. In William Wootten's case, he and his parents made the decision together, and his father signed consent papers. Many parents accompanied their children in the initial visit to CAS's office. For example, in 1880, a German widow named Roeth came in with her twelve-year-old son, George, to discuss having CAS place him on a farm in the West. Mrs. Roeth had heard positive reports of the emigration program from a young man CAS placed as a child, who had recently returned to the city. She told the CAS agent that she wanted her son "to have such a chance." CAS placed the boy with a farmer in Leroy, Kansas, for whom he worked in exchange for board. George remained there for about a year, and then left to take a paying job on a farm two miles away. In his letters home to his mother, George gave glowing reports of farm-life, and swore he would "never go back to New York." Like William, George tried to convince his mother and brothers to join him in the West, where "everything is so green and nice."(23)

For older youths, the emigration program was often the final step toward independence. These young men generally came in to CAS's office on their own, seeking the agency's help in finding work either in the city or in the West. Seventeen-year-old James Foohill, for example, came into CAS's office in the Spring of 1860, asking to go West in one of CAS's companies. James lived with an older sister in Manhattan, but had previously worked on a farm in the New York area for four years. A friend of his sister had recommended that he try his luck in the West. CAS helped James by paying for his passage to the West and finding him a job with a farmer in Greencastle, Indiana. Once the young man was settled, CAS had no further contact with him.(24) In effect, the reformers gave young men like James the financial assistance they wanted, and respected their independent status.

Young Women Seeking Work

The most striking demographic feature of the emigration program is the gender disparity. While many young men took advantage of CAS's emigration program as a means of going to better employment opportunities in the West, few young women did so. CAS actively recruited young women, but adolescent girls made up only a small fraction (5.3 percent) of the emigration program. For those who did go West, CAS arranged positions as domestic servants with families on farms or in small towns.

For a number of reasons, families may have been more reluctant to send adolescent daughters than sons far away from home. For one thing, working-class parents shared many of the same anxieties as the middle class about the temptations and potential for ruin that girls faced outside the home. Historian Christine Stansell argues that parents preferred lower-paying outwork to factory work for their daughters, because the girls remained more dependent, and closer family supervision was possible. Similarly, many families regarded domestic service as a reputable occupation for a girl, because she continued to live with a family.(25)

Poor families in the city also relied heavily on daughters' household contributions and wages to keep the family intact. Labor historian Richard Stott argues that although wage work increased the autonomy of children of both sexes, its impact on girls was much smaller. The high wages paid to young men often contributed to tensions between parents and working sons. As one immigrant noted, "boys are men at sixteen . . . they all work for themselves." If parents proved too demanding, a young man could simply move away. Young women, however, rarely received high enough wages to live independently. More typically, they remained at home, and their earnings supplemented the family income.(26)

CAS agent E.P. Smith sympathetically described the efforts of one such daughter, a young woman named Elizabeth O'Brien, who labored long hours sewing parasols to support her ailing, widowed mother and four young brothers. Elizabeth's mother told Smith, "I know Elizabeth works too hard and I am fretting to her to lay down her sewing and rest. But she says, Mother, first John wants a spelling book and Dan must have the new arithmetic - you know the teacher says he is a great scholar - and so Elizabeth sews and I hold my fretting."(27) When young women like Elizabeth sought CAS's help in finding work, they generally wanted a job in or close to the city in order to remain near their families.

The difference in employment prospects for males and females in the city also played a critical role in the skewed sex ratio of CAS's emigration program. While boys generally earned more than girls, girls had more employment opportunities open to them in the city than did boys. Domestic service provided the main employment for girls and young women. A second kind of opportunity emerged in the 1850s, when a small but growing number of factories opened in New York. The introduction of the sewing machine encouraged manufacturers in the needle trades to centralize their operations. Other light industries soon followed suit. The factory workers were overwhelmingly young, single, and female, mostly between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five.(28)

Probably the primary reason for the skewed sex ratio in the emigration program, however, came from the young women themselves. Adolescent girls seemed to have a more negative attitude toward emigration than boys. In 1864, a year after the CAS Girls' Lodging House opened, Brace noted that the agency was able to convince only 22 of the 777 young women who stayed there during the year to go West. Two decades later, Mrs. Hurley, matron of the Girls' Lodging House, continued to complain of young women's prejudice and short-sightedness in refusing to go West.(29)

Young women's lack of interest in emigration may have grown out of their distaste for the limited work opportunities they rightly expected to find in the West - it was almost exclusively domestic service. While parents and society at large may have considered domestic service safe and reputable, many young women found it demeaning. Domestic service dominated the urban labor market, too, but there were urban alternatives in factories. Young women greatly preferred the set hours and relative freedom from supervision offered by factory work to the constantly on-call status, personal demands, and close supervision implicit in domestic service.(30)

David Katzman, in his history of women in domestic service, reports the results of two investigations of domestic workers done in the nineteenth century. Young women in both surveys expressed deep dissatisfaction with domestic work. The most common complaint in both studies was the lack of freedom. One young woman responded, "You are mistress of no time of your own; other occupations have well-defined hours, after which one can do as she pleases without asking any one." Some of the women expressed feelings of loneliness and a sense of isolation. One young woman said, "What I mind is the awful loneliness... except to give orders, they [the family for whom she worked] had nothing to do with me." Others complained of employers meddling in their private lives, of not being allowed to receive friends, or of being embarrassed about having only the kitchen for receiving company.(31) Given these sentiments, there was little reason for young women to leave their jobs as domestics in the urban Northeast for more of the same in the West.

The Experience of Foster Placement

Just as the participants in the emigration program did not conform to Brace's plans, he could not guarantee that emigrants would experience the West the way he envisioned. Brace modeled the placing-out system on apprenticeship, but colored the relationship with a new emotionalism and attributed reformative powers to foster families that had not been part of the social ideas surrounding the master-apprentice relationship. As Brace portrayed it, foster parents would provide for all of a child's needs - not only food, shelter, and education, but also affection - just as they would for their own children. In turn, a foster child - like a farmer's biological children - would return the foster parent's affection, obey the parent's rules, work alongside the parent, and remain in the foster home until reaching adulthood.

Certainly, many of the children and youths in the emigration program who corresponded with CAS expressed satisfaction with their placements. CAS received - and enthusiastically shared with donors in its Annual Reports - chatty, happy letters from young emigrants, such as those from thirteen-year-old James Reed.(32) James's letters bubbled with enthusiasm: he goes to school, he loves farming, he got a new suit and hat for Christmas, he is delighted with the West and "never wants to live in the East again." Letters from other children also illustrate the generally positive tone of children's experiences in foster care. Brace must have been especially pleased with fourteen-year-old Peter Hilliard's 1880 letter: "I wish all the Lodging House boys could come to Kansas." In the same vein, John Gardener wrote ten years later that he "advises all newsboys to go West."(33)

The experiences of young people in the emigration program, however, often did not conform to Brace's romantic visions. While emotional bonds developed between many children and their foster parents, and sometimes between older youths and their employers, cultural clashes and opposed expectations triggered dissension in other placements. Employers and foster parents expected the young emigrants to be passive, obedient employees and foster children. Probably few children from any region of the country could have met such expectations, but the youths CAS brought to the West, toughened by life in the streets of New York, certainly did not. Brace's emphasis on family pathology misfired to some extent, arousing fears among Mid-westerners that New York's juvenile delinquents were being imported into their communities.(34) In addition, the young emigrants brought their own expectations into the relationships, which sometimes ran counter to those of their employers and foster parents.

The most notable divergence from Brace's ideal is that the vast majority of young people in the emigration program chose an employment arrangement rather than a familial relationship with their "foster parents." For adolescents who came to CAS looking for employment, CAS's foster placement simply served as the first stop in their Western venture. These placements entailed young people working for farmers as agricultural laborers in exchange for room and board. Once the young workers became familiar with the community and the job market, most moved on to try to better themselves or to find an employment situation more to their liking. As one young man wrote CAS, "A boy could easily find work and set his own wages as a farm hand around here."(35) Young workers initiated 80 percent of the placement changes. Most changed places within the first year, going to paying (or better paying) jobs.

The case of seventeen-year-old Thomas Tobin illustrates the way in which young emigrants were able to improve their situations once they reached the West. CAS placed Thomas with farmer C. Reed of Wymore, Nebraska in March 1885, with the understanding that the young man would work for room and board. Thomas stayed with Reed for only seven weeks, though, before he left for wage-paying work on a nearby farm. Reed did not prevent the young man from leaving or hold it against him. Reed reported to CAS that Thomas was "a nice young man," and he kept track of the youth's progress over the years. For his part, Thomas Tobin succeeded in making a good life for himself in the West. Six years after Thomas arrived in Nebraska, one of CAS's western agents reported that the young man was "well-respected" in the area and commanded "first class wages."(36)

Given the favorable employment climate for laborers in the West, employers ultimately had little choice but to pay wages to older youths or to accept their leaving for wage work elsewhere. Still, as the case of John Fratenburg shows, the issue of wages was often a source of tension between employers, their young employees, and CAS. In October 1870, CAS placed the sixteen-year-old Fratenburg with Benjamin Fuller of Raymond, Iowa. The following May, Fuller complained to CAS that John had left him after only 24 days, even though he "had bought him $15 worth of new clothes," and had promised to send the boy to school. The issue was wages. Fuller wanted the young man to work for him through the fall and winter months for room and board, and agreed to pay him wages in the spring when the planting season began. John, however, refused to stay until the spring without wages. Fuller expected a reimbursement from CAS for the money he had spent on the youth, but CAS did not comply.(37)

A third case, that of a young woman named Maggie Riley, represents another reason young people left their placements: to get away from difficult employers. Maggie, an eighteen-year-old orphan, had been living on her own before she came to CAS for help finding domestic work in 1885. CAS convinced her to go West, and found her a place with a Mrs. Huff in Burlingame, Kansas. After only a few weeks, Maggie wrote to CAS that she disliked the West, and wanted to return to New York. Once she settled in, though, Maggie realized that she disliked her employer, not the region. A month after her arrival in Kansas, she found herself a new job as a domestic with another family. Two years later, Maggie wrote to say she was still in her same position and very happy.(38)

Some of the young workers left their placements because they did not like the country or the physical rigors associated with farm labor. For example, in 1890 George Higgenbotham left his placement after a short time because, according to his own estimation, he could not "learn farming." He tried his hand at it for less than a month, and then got a job in town. Four years later, he was still living in Nebraska, and was working in the best hotel in the area.(39)

As an 1880 case demonstrates, cultural and religious conflicts also spurred young people to leave their placements. Fourteen-year-old Peter Hilllard reported to CAS that he had left his first placement after a few weeks because his employer would not allow him to attend the Catholic church. The young man's employer may have hoped to convert the youth by not allowing him to attend mass. Peter, however, found himself a new job with an Irish farmer, where he could freely practice his own faith.(40)

While geographical mobility characterized the experience of older youths in the emigration program, younger children usually remained in their foster homes until adulthood. CAS tried to place young children with couples who had few or no children in the expectation that the foster parents would "adopt" the child, that is, raise the child as their own. Potential adoptive parents preferred infants or young children (as they do today). Typically in these cases, adoptive parents did not legalize the arrangement, and CAS retained legal guardianship.(41)

An illustrative case of a CAS "adoption" was that of eight-month-old Charles Lindener. Charles had been abandoned by his parents, and came to CAS from the Staten Island Nursery in 1880. The Bayley family of Coffey County, Kansas took the baby, and renamed him William Bayley. Over the years, the Bayleys sent CAS positive reports on the boy's progress. William remained with his adoptive parents until he struck out on his own at sixteen, and got a job working for Wells Fargo.(42)

Young children, unlike older youths, had few means at their disposal to improve their situations or to control their own destinies. Younger children had relatively little say in the way the foster relationships evolved. Whether or not a foster family accepted a child depended almost totally upon the attitudes and expectations of the foster parents. Two 1860 cases illustrate the limited options available to younger children. In the case of Hugh Mangon, foster parent James McMurray blamed the seven-year-old's "treacherous nature" for the problems in the relationship. McMurray wrote CAS that he was considering giving the little boy back. Two years later, Hugh escaped from McMurray by running away. In the second case, Edward Hawkins, a ten-year-old orphan whom CAS placed with Indiana farmer Gregory Day, ran away because Day "used him badly, cruelly whipped him." One of Day's neighbors felt sorry for the boy and helped him find a new home. The power imbalance in the foster relationship left young children like Hugh and Edward with little recourse besides running away.(43) In all, eight percent of children ran away from their foster placements, probably because it was the only way to escape a bad situation.

Social attitudes about child abuse in this period may have led CAS to ignore or deny the existence of child abuse or neglect in foster homes. Brace and other middle-class reformers defined abuse and violence as class- and ethnic-linked behaviors. Cruelty to children was a vice of "inferior" classes and cultures.(44) CAS removed children from lower-class urban parents and placed them with rural foster parents in order to "save" them. The agency attributed to foster parents and their country homes all of the virtues inherent in middle-class domestic ideology and child nurture. By ignoring problems in foster homes, CAS could continue to promote foster care as the premier child-saving methodology.

The Success of the Emigration Program

In his 1872 work, The Dangerous Classes of New York, Brace claimed that "the experiment of 'Emigration' has been an unmingled blessing" for the children of New York's dangerous classes. The great masses of children sent West, he asserted, became "honest producers on the Western soil instead of burdens or pests here." Rather than "preying on the community" or becoming "living idlers on the alms of the public," the young emigrants became indistinguishable from the young men and women native to Midwestern towns and villages. Large numbers of former emigrants, according to Brace, owned their own farms, while others were professionals, mechanics, or shopkeepers; the girls generally married well. Very few, he insisted, returned to New York.(45)

High on CAS's list of criteria for the success of the emigration program was that emigrants remain in the West. Brace contended that the emigration program succeeded in this way, and that few emigrants returned to New York. As noted previously, though, CAS did not keep close tabs on the youths placed in employment situations; hence, the agency did not know the outcome of every case. Almost half of the case records in the study sample included no information on emigrants' subsequent lives. However, the cases for which information is available show that a majority of these emigrants (64.9 percent) did, indeed, remain in the West [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED].

Among those who remained in the country, many "succeeded" in another of the ways Brace envisioned, becoming economically-independent, productive citizens. For a young person like Hugh Scullen the emigration program provided a push up the social mobility ladder. Hugh, an Irish orphan, was sixteen and living on his own in the city when he came to CAS in 1880. CAS arranged a job for him with Virginia farmer Beford Brown. Years later as an adult, Hugh dropped by CAS's New York office to thank the CAS staff for sending him to Virginia. He had remained with Brown for two years, and then moved to Atlanta. He now lived in Chicago and claimed he was doing quite well for himself in business.(46)

The historical scholarship on social mobility in the United States generally cites modest, incremental gains made by individuals as a result of immigration or within populations over several generations.(47) CAS's emigration program facilitated just such gains for young people like Hugh Scullen. The program provided a route out of an economic market in which workers faced chronic under-employment, economic instability, and poverty to one that offered them a chance at steady employment and financial security. While the study sample included no men of fame or fortune, it did include many farmers, mechanics, and businessmen.

To Brace, the most important step in breaking the chain of "hereditary pauperism" entailed the permanent removal of children from the "contaminating" influences of family and friends. Despite Brace's and CAS's efforts to break up poor families, for many emigrants ties with their natural families remained strong. As noted earlier, many parents never equated foster placement with giving up their children, but envisioned it as a temporary means of caring for their children during a time of turmoil or transition. Once they resolved their immediate crisis or situation, parents took their children back. Even when a children remained in the foster home and enjoyed a warm, loving bond with his foster parents, it did not necessarily negate or interfere with his feelings for his natural parents. The case records indicate that 30 percent of emigrants remained in contact with their families during placement. (It should be kept in mind that many of the emigrants were orphans who had no immediate family members.) Only one individual in the study sample - a girl placed at a very young age - expressly rejected her natural parents.

Even among orphans, family ties sometimes persisted. Siblings frequently reconstituted the original family, which undermined CAS's efforts to create new, "uncorrupted" family environments. Even when CAS separated orphaned siblings by placing them in different foster homes, they often continued functioning as a family. The three McQuinn children illustrate the way siblings managed to stick together as a family in spite of many years' separation and new familial ties to their foster families. The McQuinns came to CAS in 1863 from the Home for Seaman's Children. CAS found homes for all three of the young orphans in Farmington, Michigan. The eldest, twelve-year-old Josephine, lived very happily with the Murray family until she married in 1867. Eleven-year-old Andrew did not stay at his foster home long, preferring to hire out around the county. The youngest, eight-year-old Anna, lived with the Reverend and Mrs. Grow, who thought of her as their child. As an adult, Josephine regrouped the original family around her. She and her husband moved to Indiana, taking her brother Andrew with them. Anna split her time between her two families, until she married a Michigan man in 1874.(48)

GAS portrayed natural families as corruptive, and foster families as reformative. Many foster parents ascribed to this view as well; but not all. On occasion, biological and foster parents worked out a "joint custody" type of arrangement for the child. Like Anna McQuinn, these young emigrants traveled back and forth between their two families. These arrangements rested on the strength of the young person's bonds with both families as well as on the mutual respect shown by the adults toward the child's "other" family.

In these cases, natural parents generally believed that the West offered better opportunities for their children, and therefore consented to - or even encouraged - children to remain in foster homes. For instance, Albert Haas's mother brought him to CAS for placement during a family crisis. CAS found the five-year-old a home with Walter Scudder of Summit County, Ohio. Three years later, Mrs. Haas went to Ohio to retrieve her son. Once home again in New York, Albert kept up a correspondence with his foster parent. In 1866, when he was eleven, Albert and his mother decided that Ohio would be a better place for him than New York. Walter Scudder gladly took the boy back. Albert wrote to CAS soon after returning to Ohio, saying that he was happy, in school, and planned to stay with Scudder until he came of age.(49)

Similarly, Mrs. Warren, an impoverished young mother of two living in Newark, New Jersey, heard of the emigration program and brought her children to CAS for foster homes. Mrs. Warren said she wanted her children, ten-year-old Lucy and seven-year-old Alonzo, to have a better home in the West than she could provide for them. CAS placed Lucy with Samuel Cushing in Illinois, who not only informed Mrs. Warren of Lucy's progress, but made a trip to Newark to visit her. A family in Michigan adopted young Alonzo, but, through letters, he, too, remained in touch with his mother.(50)

Brace may have been correct in heralding the economic success of the emigration program. However, Brace's objective for the emigration program was less as a means of economic mobility for urban youth than as a means of their moral reform. On that, the record is more equivocal. CAS failed to "reform" immigrants to the extent advertised in that the agency did not succeed in breaking the bonds between poor children and their families. Family ties persisted despite CAS, time apart, and geographical distance. In a number of cases, emigrants brought their families to live with them in the West. The success of the emigration program clearly did not depend upon breaking children's ties to their natural families. Most emigrants adjusted to country life, achieved a modicum of economic success, and remained in touch with their families. Emigrants' success in light of their continued bonds with their families points up the rhetorical nature of Brace's views on family break-up, and demonstrates the bankruptcy of such a methodology as a child-saving strategy.

Conclusion

Two often-contradictory versions of CAS's history co-exist. One can be gleaned from the organization's public records; the other from its private records. It is unclear why Brace ignored much of the information his staff collected in the case records. Perhaps CAS and its founder preferred to present the public - and themselves - with an idealized vision of the organization and the people it helped. The public nature of Brace's writing and its preservation for posterity has allowed his ideas to influence the direction and policies of social work in a way that CAS's private practices - created in discourse with working-class youths and their families - could not. As a result, Brace's rhetoric has wielded a powerful influence on modern attitudes toward poverty and social welfare.

One of Brace's most enduring - and most problematic - legacies to modern social services is that he made it acceptable policy to intervene in the lives of the poor on the grounds of protecting their children. While the rhetoric and methodology surrounding intervention have changed, this fundamental rationalization has not. Widespread acceptance of the policy of family break-up has made it possible for social service workers to remove a child from a home whenever they determine that it is "appropriate." Modern social service workers might consider removal of a child to be the last resort, but it is, nevertheless, among their powers.

In reading only the public record, welfare historians have given too much credence to Brace's rhetoric about the poor. CAS's clients also played a critical role in shaping the agency's practices in the late nineteenth century; it is time for their voices to be heard. The case records for CAS's emigration program reveal that working-class families exhibited enormous resourcefulness and agency in the struggle to provide for themselves and their children. Though the balance of social and economic power rested with the middle-class reformers, the relationship between GAS and its clients was not a one-sided imposition of cultural values. Working-class families managed to exact from CAS the assistance they wanted and needed. Parents used foster placement to ease the family's travails during times of transition or crisis and to gamer better economic opportunities for their children. Adolescents used the placing-out system to gain entry into the labor force, to find better paying or more stable jobs, or to have an adventure in the exotic, unknown West.

The findings of this study illustrate the importance of considering the roles of all of the actors in histories of social welfare - recipients of aid as well as policy-makers. Brace may have set up the emigration program to remove poor children from their families, but CAS's clients used the program to achieve their own ends. Their experiences suggest that a fresh look at modern social services is in order, one which examines the social construction of the welfare system, and its continuities and discontinuities with the past.

641 6th Avenue

New York, NY

ENDNOTES

1. Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years' Work Among Them (New York, 1872; reprinted, Washington, DC: National Association of Social Workers, 1973), pp. 88-89, 265.

2. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, pp. 230, 238-239, 243; CAS, Fourth Annual Report, 1857, pp. 8. Two works explore the influence of evangelical religion and domestic ideology on Brace's social philosophy: Kristine E. Nelson, "The Best Asylum: Charles Loring Brace and Foster Family Care," (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1980); Barbara Finkelstein, "Casting Networks of Good Influence: The Reconstruction of Childhood in the United States, 1790-1870," in Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, eds., American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook (Westport, 1985).

3. Marilyn Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln, 1992); Kenneth Bagnail, The Little Immigrants: The Orphans Who Came to Canada (Toronto, 1980); G.P. Parr, Labouring Children (London, 1980); Gillian Wagner, Barnardo (London, 1979).

4. Walter I. Trattnor, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (New York, 1984), 3rd ed.; Robert Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York, 1956); Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth Century America (Baltimore, 1982); Holt, The Orphan Trains.

5. Michael Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986), pp. 106-109; Ann Vanderpol, "Dependent Children, Child Custody and the Mother's Pensions: the Transformation of State-Family Relations in the Early Twentieth Century," Social Problems vol. 29, no. 3, (1982): 221-235; Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America (Cambridge, MA, 1978).

6. Bruce Bellingham, "Little Wanders: A Socio-Historical Study of the Nineteenth Century Origins of Child Fostering and Adoption Reform, based on Early Records," (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1984).

7. Records of the Emigration Department of the Children's Aid Society of New York, 1853-1899. The records of the emigration program are contained in a set of fifty-six ledger books, which the Children's Aid Society still holds in its possession, dating from the agency's first year, 1853, through 1899. In CAS's ledgers, the date of departure of each "company" (CAS's term for a group leaving New York) provides the organizing principle of the record-keeping system. A company's record gives information on the agent in charge of the expedition, the company's destination, and the composition of the company in terms of age, sex, and birthplace of each individual. For every child in the company under CAS's guardianship, there is also a case record. While children's records vary considerably in the amount of information they contain, a typical record provides a brief description of the child's situation at intake: name, age, place of birth, religion (rarely), parental mortality (i.e., whether a child's parents were alive or dead), residence, how and why the child came to CAS, and if a crisis existed at the time of intake. Once CAS placed a child, the company's western agent provided the name and address of the foster parent. Over the years, a child's record would be updated to note the agent's progress reports, and any further involvement required of CAS, such as removal or replacement of a child due to his incorrigibility or the unsuitability of the foster parent. The file also summarized any correspondence that passed between CAS and the child or the foster parent.

8. Charles Loring Brace, "The Science of Charity," in The Nation, vol. 8, June 10, 1869, pp. 457-458; Brace, The Dangerous C/asses, pp. 76-77.

9. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and C/ass/n New York, 1789-1860 (Urbana, 1987), p. 199; Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, NY, 1990), pp. 182, 286.

10. See Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, 1990) on the importance of women's paid and unpaid labor to family economy.

11. Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York, 1988), p. 91; Stansell, City of Women, p. 12.

12. Journal of E.P. Smith, CAS Agent, 1853, Children's Aid Society, New York, entries dated Sept. 12, 26, 27.

13. All case records in the sample are from the Record Books of the Emigration Department of the Children's Aid Society of New York, 1853-1899. This study assigned a case record number to the records for each child in the sample of 432. The case record number (CR) consists of Record Book volume number and page number within the volume. For example, the cases mentioned in the text are from Record Book Volume 28, pages 323 and 324, which makes the case record numbers CR28.323 and CR28.324. In a few instances, more than one case record appears on a page; in these cases, a letter follows the case number (e.g., a, b, c) to indicate the order of the case on the page.

14. John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe (New York, 1988); David Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, NJ, 1988); Joan Sherwood, Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Spain: The Women and Children of the Inclusa (Toronto, 1988); Louise Tilly and Rachel Fuchs discuss Volker Hunecke's work in Journal of Family History vol. 17, no. 1,1992, pp. 6-13; Barbara Brenzel, Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856-1905 (Cambridge, MA, 1983).

15. CR26.195.

16. CR3.065

17. CR10.034; CR10.036; CR10.035.

18. CR10.048; CR10.047.

19. CR10.375; CR10.376.

20. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, pp. 241-242; Smith's Journal, Sept. 22.

21. For an examination of boarding in the 19th Century, see: Michael B. Katz and Ian E. Davey, "Youth and Early Industrialization in a Canadian City," in John Demos and Sarane Spence Boocock, eds., Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family, reprints from American Journal of Sociology, vol. 84 supplement 1978 (Chicago, 1978); Michael B. Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), ch. 5; Laurence A. Glasco, "The Life Cycles and Household Structure of American Ethnic Groups: Irish, Germans, and Native-born Whites in Buffalo, New York, 1855," in Tamara K. Hareyen, ed., Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1700-1930 (New York, 1977), pp. 122-143; John Modell and Tamara K. Hareyen, "Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families," in Hareven, Family and Kin, pp. 164-186.

22. CR26.169.

23. CR23.130.

24. CR7.402.

25. Stansell, City of Women, pp. 118-119.

26. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, p. 121.

27. Smith's Journal, May 24.

28. Stansell, City of Women, pp. 120-121,166-167; CAS, Seventh Annual Report, 1860, pp. 6-7.

29. CAS, Eleventh Annual Report, 1864; Thirty-first Annual Report, 1884.

30. For an examination of the life and labor of domestic workers, see: Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Ct., 1983), and David Katzman, Seven Days a Week (Urbana, IL, 1981); Stansell, City of Women, p. 167.

31. Katzman, Seven Days a Week, pp. 3-16.

32. CR26.428.

33. CR23.149; CR28.248.

34. National Conference of Charities and Correction, Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction 1879 (PNCCC), pp. 157-160; PNCCC 1882, pp. 147-155. Kristine E. Nelson in "The Best Asylum," pp. 233-238, provides an excellent overview of Midwestern opposition to the emigration program.

35. CR28.233.

36. CR26.204.

37. CR17.73.

38. CR26.432.

39. CR28.240.

40. CR23.149.

41. The child-saving impetus that prompted CAS's foster care program spawned parallel developments in adoption law in this same period. Adoption did not exist as a legal entity in America prior to the 1851 passage of the Massachusetts statute, "An Act to Provide for the Adoption of Children." Over the next twenty-five years, twenty-four states adopted similar statutes. For an historical overview of adoption, see Stephen Presser, "The Historical Background of the American Law of Adoption," Journal of Family Law 11 (1972): 443-516; John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970), pp. 79-90; see also Jamil S. Zainaldin, "The Emergence of a Modern American Family Law: Child Custody, Adoption, and the Courts, 1796-1851," Northwestern University Law Review vol. 79, no. 6 (1979): 1038-1089.

42. CR23.151.

43. CR7.434; CR7.430.

44. Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, pp. 27-29, discusses nineteenth-century reformers' views on cruelty to children and the ways in which those views influenced the development of the child-saving movement.

45. Brace, Dangerous Classes, pp. 241-242.

46. CR23.369.

47. See, for example, Stephen Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, MA, 1964); Stephen Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Cambridge, MA, 1973); Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West; John Bodnar, et. al. Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 (Urbana, IL, 1981).

48. CR10.387; CR10.388; CR10.389.

49. CR7.592.

50. CR10.378; CR10.379.