Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America.

By Timothy A. Hacsi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. x plus 297pp. $39.95).

The orphanage is not only a topic of historical interest but, in recent years, has become au courant in political debates on poverty, welfare, and child dependency. Those debates on Capitol Hill have quieted down a bit, however. Perhaps Newt Gingrich received more press on the issue than he ever intended. But his 1994 comments did reignite a century-long argument over how best to care for poor dependent children - in the orphan asylum, in foster care, or in their own homes.

According to David Hacsi, even though foster care and mothers' pensions (later AFDC) won out, "orphanages never completely went away." In a literal sense, many former orphanages still exist today, transformed over time into groups homes for emotionally disturbed youth. In a more figurative sense, Hacsi claims that orphanages have never really left the public consciousness, "though they are remembered in two very different ways" - either as Dickensian warehouses or as idealistic Boys Towns.

It is possible that over time orphan asylums evolved from one extreme into the other. But more correctly, says Hacsi, these starkly contrasting images probably never existed in reality. Rather, over a period of 100 years or more, the orphanage is best characterized as a diverse and evolving system of child-care. No two institutions were quite alike, each one diverging from the next in terms of policy or philosophy, management or funding, routine or education, parental rights or exposure to life outside the asylum.

Social welfare history has undergone a resurgence over the past few decades, spurred on not only by the "new" social history, but by historians whose interests have been the public welfare institution or the recipients of public welfare or a combination of the two, all scrutinized vis-a-vis the question of benevolence versus "social control." After reading Timothy Hacsi's book, it's not surprising that he claims a debt of gratitude to Michael Katz whose work on poverty "from the bottom-up" has inspired many writers to look beyond the structure of public welfare to those served by the system.

It seems a natural progression that historians should embrace the orphan asylum as a topic of historical and social relevance. In fact, that has been the case over the past decade, generally with authors focusing on a single institution, comparing and contrasting two or more institutions, or studying groups of asylums affiliated with a particular religious or ethnic group.

Hacsi's goal has been to synthesize much of this literature and to provide a comprehensive picture of the orphanage, the process of change over time, and the role of the asylum in the lives of the poor. He does a good job of tracing the asylum from the decade of the 1830s, with the rise of urban poverty and the demographic impact of epidemic disease, to the 1930s with the institution's gradual but ultimate decline. He ushers us along this century-long continuum, discussing the asylum from a number of perspectives - its numerical growth and proliferation, its divergent goals and philosophies, its varied management and funding structures, its assorted rules and routines, and the opportunities it offered its residents for education, recreation, and contact with family and friends outside asylum wall.

Amidst the diversity, Timothy Hacsi identifies three types of child-care institutions that prevailed from the period of the 1830s to the 1930s. The classifications are based on the extent to which a particular orphanage did or did not restrict a child's access to friends, family, and external community. "Isolating" orphan asylums "fit the social control model," says Hacsi. Children in this type of institution "were thoroughly closed off from society, and their daily routines were closely regulated; their contact with their parents was severely limited." "Protective" asylums also removed children from outside influences in an effort to "save" them from damaging environments, while providing them with material comfort and secular and religious education. But, rather than being severed from their familial and cultural roots, children received care, training, and education that mirrored their own background (generally religious or ethnic affiliation). Children in these "protective" asylums usually returned to their families upon discharge.

Hacsi refers to the third category as the "integrative" orphan asylum, which he says allowed children protection while also providing experience in the outside world of churches and schools and neighborhoods. These children were also allowed regular contact with family, and they too usually returned to their homes once parents were able to care for them.

These categories "should not be seen as mutually exclusive," Hacsi emphasizes. No one institution fit a basic type entirely, but elements of one institutional type could usually be found to some extent in another. And over time, most institutions, no matter what their original intent, did develop more integrative philosophies in step with 20th century trends in child psychology and the dominance of the concept of "nurture" over "nature."

But while attempting to create a typology of institutional child-care, the reader should not lose site of the central premise of most literature on the orphan asylum, which is that orphanages first and foremost served economically impoverished families. Only a small percentage of asylum children were in fact orphans. Most came from single-parent or two-parent homes that, Hacsi says, placed their children "not for lack of love, but as a temporarily solution to death or illness of a mate, or the lack of a steady income." As Hacsi concludes, "the fact that asylums could serve both short-term and long-term clients with some measure of success may have been their greatest triumph."

Orphanages touched the lives of many. With no statistical evidence to support such a claim, it is likely that of any ten individuals you ask, at least one will have a memory or have been privy to a relative's recollections of asylum life.

Whether as memory or debate, the orphanage is not yet entirely an anachronism in our age. The concept of congregate child-care retains as yet some bit of relevance. Oddly, one of the most broad-based efforts at analyzing the relevance of the orphanage idea in the context of today's welfare apparatus is spearheaded by Richard McKenzie, who is neither historian, nor politician, nor social welfare professional. Rather, McKenzie is an internationally known professor of economics, who just happens to be a child of the asylum.

Hacsi doesn't mention McKenzie or his book, published only recently by Sage Publications, Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st Century (September 1998). But Hacsi's and McKenzie's ultimate concerns and questions are the same. According to Hacsi, orphanages are being discussed today as a partial solution to society's current ills. "But that assumption may rest on a misreading of what our current ills are," and, he says, "it is certainly based on a complete misunderstanding of the strengths and weaknesses of institutional care for children."

While often repetitive because of the book's organization, "Second Home" is nevertheless an important synthesis of current literature on the history of the orphan asylum and should be considered a thorough introduction to the subject at this time. It is certainly important reading for those looking to the past for solutions to the present.

Judith Dulberger

Youngstown, OH 44504