In this series
In this series
I’ve written earlier in this series about the connection between homelessness and “adverse childhood experiences,” including unstable childhoods marked by movement around multiple foster homes. In centuries past, Americans hoped that orphanages would help to alleviate the damage already incurred by children without parents—or without parents who took good care of them. What happened to those institutions?
Orphanages started as compassionate Christian responses to tragedy. Famed evangelist George Whitefield ardently fundraised in 1740 to lay the first brick of the Bethesda Orphanage, the first in America. From then up through 1900, orphanages were the main prescription when parents (or other relatives) were unavailable.
The New York Orphan Asylum Society in 1806 hired a “pious and respectable man and his wife” as superintendent and matron, saying orphans “must have religious instruction, moral example, and habits of industry inculcated on their minds.” Epidemics including cholera in 1832 created more orphans and led to new efforts.
America had close to 200 orphanages in 1860. The orphan home in Charleston was five stories high with three dining rooms, three floors of bedrooms, and steam heat throughout. Its architects proudly reported that the building contained 2,355,000 bricks, 222 doors, 298 windows, and 39,000 feet of pipes.
It was during that century that some orphanages adopted the “foster home” label, as they also cared for children from destitute families and abusive homes. The quality of these institutions—and the results of their childrearing—were mixed. Two Cincinnati kids known as Sully and Tully became orphans at five and six years old. Sully spent nine years in prison after killing a man. Jim Tully learned to read, became a newspaper reporter and then the “hobo novelist,” writing nine of them and gaining recognition as “the greatest long shot in American literature.” He said he “didn’t know what would have become of him had it not been for the orphanage.”
Early in the twentieth century, Progressives criticized orphanages: Too many rules! Not enough freedom for children! Too high a cost! A desire to learn how those ideas spread led me to spend several hours with The Delineator, a magazine and marketing device published from 1867 to 1937 by the Butterick sewing pattern design company, founded by the delightfully named Ebenezer Butterick.
The magazine took on a decidedly anti-institutionalist tone once socialist Thedore Dreiser became its editor in 1907. His first novel, Sister Carrie, had a heroine who enjoyed illicit relationships and suffered no consequences. He hired birth control advocate Mabel Potter Daggett, whose exposé in 1908 screamed, “WHERE 100,000 CHILDREN WAIT. In Old-fashioned Orphan Asylums. They Are Victims of Oppressive Routine.”
The report told of orphanages picking up homeless children who were “drifting about in the alleys, living from hand to mouth, committed by a kindly court that snatches them from crime to come.” That might seem like a compassionate rescue, but Daggett said orphanages should give way to “the most advanced sociology. Nineteenth century methods of philanthropy are called sternly to the bar by the twentieth century.”
Daggett painted a scene of compassion on trial: “‘Why,’ falters the amazed defendant, ‘see, I have invested millions of dollars in the beautiful buildings in which I have housed these children.’” Such expenditures were faulty, Daggett ruled, because orphanages did not encourage children to express their individuality and develop their own standards of right and wrong. For example, “a whole dormitory drops on its knees with folded hands and the droning accents of the Lord’s Prayer reverberate through the room.”
To this, Daggett added a financial appeal: Putting a child in a private home “costs only about $50; this over against the hundreds that the community must spend to care for a child under maturity in an institution.” Besides, 53 percent of orphanage expenses in California and 51 percent in New York came from taxpayers. An editorial in The Delineator asked its readers the question directly: “Are you content to see these little ones imprisoned in orphan asylums where machine charity clothes them, teaches them?”
The exposé in 1908 helped Dreiser, Daggett, and “fifty agencies, whose sole object is the welfare of the child,” build “The Delineator Child-Rescue Campaign.” Its backers included heads of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Congress of Mothers, and the Children Aid Society, as well as the wealthy (like Edith Rockefeller McCormick) and the politically connected (e.g. Mary Bryan, wife of William Jennings Bryan, who that year was the Democratic Party presidential candidate for a third time).
Bryan lost, but the Delineator push contributed to the calling of the 1909 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, where 200 attendees agreed to oppose orphanages and propose foster care instead. That led to creation of the Children’s Bureau, which in 1920 became the Child Welfare League of America. Its director, Carl Carstens, opposed “institutional care for children,” although he later grudgingly admitted some necessity.
The conferences continued, and two decades later the event had 3,000 attendees. I won’t run through all the government conferences and journalistic attacks on the orphanage as “a jail-like institution” with “lack of respect for the individual,” because Nurith Zmora has done that in Orphanages Reconsidered. She describes how the orphans themselves were often positive about their experience and created “wrenching scenes” when administrators pushed them into foster families.
Home Away From Home: The Forgotten History of Orphanages similarly shows how some orphanages often gave children stability. Some self-sacrificing foster parents did wonderful work too, but others more interested in the pay—especially after the federal government became increasingly involved in the second half of the century—gave up on children who annoyed them. To this day, stable foster care can be beneficial, but when children are bounced around to multiple homes, the results are not good.
Richard McKenzie, who grew up in an orphanage and became a University of California professor, is an advocate of orphanages and also a chronicler of how orphanage advocates have received ridicule on grounds both philosophical and financial: suppression of individuality and what The New York Times called “uncomfortable facts. Orphanages, if staffed and equipped properly, are very expensive.” As one critic emphatically put it: “orphanages don’t come cheap.”
But then, neither does the homelessness that may result when a childhood of instability and insecurity leaves adults less able to cope with adversity. The results of orphanages are mixed, and I admire the Safe Families for Children emphasis on ways for children to stay with birthparents: For the sake of children and parents, we need openness to a wide range of approaches.
