Raising Government Children

A History of Foster Care and the American Welfare State

Catherine E. Rymph

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469635651
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the 1930s, buoyed by the potential of the New Deal, child welfare reformers hoped to formalize and modernize their methods, partly through professional casework but more importantly through the loving care of temporary, substitute families. Today, however, the foster care system is widely criticized for failing the children and families it is intended to help. How did a vision of dignified services become virtually synonymous with the breakup of poor families and a disparaged form of "welfare" that stigmatizes the women who provide it, the children who receive it, and their families? Tracing the evolution of the modern American foster care system from its inception in the 1930s through the 1970s, Catherine Rymph argues that deeply gendered, domestic ideals, implicit assumptions about the relative value of poor children, and the complex public/private nature of American welfare provision fueled the cultural resistance to funding maternal and parental care. What emerged was a system of public social provision that was actually subsidized by foster families themselves, most of whom were concentrated toward the socioeconomic lower half, much like the children they served. Analyzing the ideas, debates, and policies surrounding foster care and foster parents' relationship to public welfare, Rymph reveals the framework for the building of the foster care system and draws out its implications for today's child support networks.

CHAPTER 1

INTO THE FAMILY LIFE OF STRANGERS

The Origins of Foster Family Care

In 1928, Angelo Costa, an Italian immigrant living in Minneapolis, found himself in crisis. His wife and newborn baby had recently died. Struggling to hold steady work due to a war injury and with a young son and two daughters to raise, Angelo faced a dilemma—how to both provide for and care for his children. Where and to whom could he turn? Out-of-home care for his children would turn out to be one of his only options. But this was not yet the modern, bureaucratic, publicly licensed system of supervised foster care that would arise within a few decades. Angelo’s crisis happened at a time when that system was only just beginning to take shape.

The “story of the development of supervised foster care as it now operates,” as one curious child welfare worker would later put it, extended far back into foster care’s roots in much older traditions of caring for poor and dependent children.¹ A number of these traditions have been explored at length by other scholars, but briefly reviewing them helps us to appreciate the daunting task that child welfare professionals would face in the mid-twentieth century as they tried to make out-of-home placement conform to their developing understandings of families, of child welfare services, and of the role of the state in providing those services. Such a review also assists us in focusing on the traditional power relations within families, communities, and the nation that helped shape the precursors to modern foster family care. As Tim Hacsi has argued, “Without an understanding of how poor children have been cared for by charity and welfare, no study of politics or economic development can fully explain what the American welfare state does not do very well. And of all the welfare state’s failures, none is more glaring than its inability to provide for poor children.”²

The long history of foster care in the United States extends back to various colonial practices of indenture and apprenticeship. Indeed, the National Foster Parent Association has, since 1974, heralded Benjamin Eaton, a seven-year-old boy bound out by his widowed mother in 1636, as the nation’s “first foster child.”³ The NFPA didn’t seem to know much about Eaton when it claimed him (and got some important facts wrong), but we can find him in the historical record. His father, Francis, a resident of Plymouth colony, died insolvent in 1633, leaving four minor children, including Benjamin. Like Angelo Costa several centuries later, Francis’s widow, Christian, faced a crisis of care. She found herself with four youngsters but no financial resources from her husband’s estate to help with their care. Three years later, in February 1636, Christian apprenticed Benjamin to Bridgett Fuller for fourteen years.⁴

Even if Eaton was the “first” recorded case of a European child bound out as an indentured servant in the Massachusetts Bay Colony—possible, but not likely—we know that Native American, African, and mixed-race children regularly found themselves in situations not all that different from Benjamin’s. And what does it mean to read our modern conception of “foster child” back into the seventeenth century, when ideas of family, the state, and child welfare were profoundly different? Indenture and apprenticeship of children, practices brought to the colonies from England and modeled on aspects of Elizabethan Poor Law, were part of a labor system. Masters signed contracts with a child’s guardians, promising training and support in exchange for the services of the child.⁵ From their apprentices, households and craftsmen received the advantages of household labor. In this sense, children paid for their own support.

Indenture was a labor system, but it was also an early means by which communities provided for the welfare of dependent children, an obligation derived from the Poor Law tradition of parens patriae.⁶ Such arrangements were not to be—or, at least not intended to be—one-sided. The head of household was expected to act like a parent by supporting, nurturing, and educating the child in his or her care and provide training in a useful skill. Even in cases where indenture was a private arrangement between two families, the state was at least tangentially involved through the use of contracts, enforceable through the courts, to seal these agreements. Furthermore, communities had to pay to bind out an infant, who, unlike an older child, did not come with an ability to work. As with more modern foster care practices, poverty was a significant reason why a child like Benjamin Eaton would be placed with another family. Community morals and standards of behavior also played a role. In colonial Virginia, churchwardens could bind out children whose parents they considered to be “idle.”⁷ By 1660, the selectmen of Massachusetts were authorized to remove badly behaved children from their homes and apprentice them to masters who would do a better job of forcing them to “submit unto government.”⁸

The practice of indenture may seem remote from that of modern foster care. Whatever the problems with the system today, foster care is at least intended to promote children’s interests, not exploit their labor. But the idea that children were to be valued purely for the emotional attachment adults felt for them is a fairly recent one. Viviana Zelizer maintains that such sentimental understandings of children first became engrained for middle-class urban families only in the mid-nineteenth century.⁹ By that point, indenture had been gradually giving way to wage labor. And, as antislavery sentiment grew, so too came the suspicion that indenture, under which many children of all races continued to be bound, looked itself to be too much like enslavement.¹⁰ Yet by the early nineteenth century, urbanization and the concentrations of poverty associated with it would mean a growing need for out-of-home care for children. Public almshouses, insane asylums, and even adult prisons came to house many poor children who had nowhere else to go.

Orphanages were meant to be a more humane and specialized alternative to almshouses or adult prisons (though only for some children). The “vast majority” were local undertakings, managed and funded privately. This meant directors could be selective in choosing the children they would serve. Religious selection was common, as many of the orphanages were constructed to serve specific faith communities. Almost half of children in orphanages at the end of the nineteenth century were living in Catholic institutions.¹¹ Orphanages tended to be restricted to white children, although a few black orphan asylums were created, sometimes by African Americans themselves but more often with white sponsorship.¹² According to Tim Hacsi, by 1880 there were over six hundred orphanages in the United States serving more than fifty thousand children.¹³

Despite their name, orphanages did not strictly house full orphans and, in fact, often served as a safety net for poor parents. Able-bodied children whose families were unable to raise them due to poverty, illness, or death might be turned over—often reluctantly or unwillingly—to orphanages.¹⁴ The parents of children with disabilities, meanwhile, were encouraged to place their children in institutions such as schools for the blind, homes for crippled children, or asylums for the feeble-minded.¹⁵ Parents were expected to pay an orphanage something toward the care of their children, although not all did. Placements were often temporary, with children returning to their families when they became old enough to go to school, when a widow remarried, or when an unemployed father found work.¹⁶

The relationship between public and private support for orphanages was complex and would help shape the development of foster care. Once state legislators began banning the placement of children in almshouses starting in the mid-1870s, the states had to care for dependent children in other ways, leading them, in some cases, to establish public orphanages at the state or county level.¹⁷ As Andrew Billingsley and Jeanne Giovannoni have argued, the shift from private to public child welfare services meant more services available to black children as African Americans “inevitably fare better where the givers of services are publicly accountable.”¹⁸ But that shift from public to private was uneven. States with a powerful network of preexisting private orphanages, like New York, chose not to establish public institutions but instead to provide subsidies to those private orphanages housing children committed by courts or public relief agencies.¹⁹ Because private institutions were free to turn away children who were poorly behaved or who exhibited particular defects of body or character, it was the children perceived as challenging, different, or less desirable (a group which typically included black children) who ended up in state institutions.²⁰ In the South, even many public institutions served white children only.²¹ Many child welfare reformers would later see public subsidy of private institutions as inherently problematic, but the practice developed for quite pragmatic reasons. In states where private orphanages were in place long before public ones, states simply “drifted” into the practice of subsidizing existing private institutions because it was less expensive, because it was easier, and because “public” welfare carried more stigma for recipients than did private charity.²²

Not all mid-nineteenth-century child welfare reformers saw orphanages as appropriate alternatives for children in need of homes. Theology student Charles Loring Brace was, like other reformers, profoundly distressed by the conditions of the street children he observed when he first came to New York City in 1848. Especially troubling to Brace were the large numbers of homeless children he encountered who were begging, selling flowers, or working as prostitutes. In 1849, reformers estimated that as many as forty thousand of New York City’s children, many of whom were immigrants or children of immigrants, lived on the streets.²³ Yet Brace was not persuaded that orphanages were an improvement over adult institutions, because they were, after all, still institutions. What destitute children needed, Brace believed, were the wholesome effects of family life. In 1853 he created the Children’s Aid Society and soon instituted his famous “placing out” program, better known today as the “orphan trains.” The homes that took in these children were also sometimes called “free homes” because no money was given in exchange for care. Although Brace did not invent the system, his would become the name most associated with it. Orphan trains sent impoverished, able-bodied children from the rough and dirty streets of the cities to live, often permanently, with rural families in nearby states and eventually in farther away parts of the Midwest, the South, and the West. In what one historian has described as Brace’s recreation of the “old concept of indenture” in a “new form,” children were still expected to work for their new family within the context of household labor, yet they were not bound out by contract.²⁴ Through the ennobling effects of outdoor rural living, character-building labor, and wholesome family life, children’s lives would be transformed.²⁵ Society’s cast-off waifs would become productive citizens.

Like orphanages, these placing-out programs did not exclusively serve orphans. Certainly some youngsters were placed out by the Children’s Aid Society because their parents had died or had abandoned them. In other cases, parents voluntarily pursued placement with the Children’s Aid Society to address immediate economic crises in the family.²⁶ But Brace also sought out children whose families appeared to be too impoverished or culturally problematic. And his agency at times applied intense pressure to parents to give up their children. For Brace, the biological families of poor children were a large part of the problem; the solution to child dependency and neglect was to remove children from the influences of those urban, immigrant, impoverished (and often Catholic) families and place them in homes he felt would provide a more stable and wholesome atmosphere—rural, native-born, and Protestant. Brace and his colleagues saw placing out as a solution to the problems of urban poverty and, later, of escalating immigration.²⁷

Although the Children’s Aid Society was a private organization dependent on donations, its child placement program was also subsidized by New York City and New York State and therefore can be seen as form of proto-public child welfare services.²⁸ Public subsidy did not yet bring public accountability, however. Neither did the Children’s Aid Society offer its own oversight. Brace’s program initially did not screen receiving parents, nor did it provide any systematic follow-up with children once they were placed.²⁹ As a consequence, while some receiving families were loving and treated their new children as their own, others were merely seeking something akin to a servant or a free farmhand. This was particularly the case with older boys, who were also in greatest demand.³⁰ Although Brace’s “orphan train” system is well known, rural placements also occurred much closer to home, as midwestern states sought solutions for their own dependent children through farm placements. According to historian Megan Birk, between 1850 and 1900 farm placement was so widespread in the Midwest that between 20 and 30 percent of farm homes included children who were not biologically related to the adults.³¹

The orphan trains are often cited as the origins of the modern foster care system and Brace as foster care’s “father.”³² Certainly the placing-out model played an important role in the development of twentieth-century child welfare practices, particularly in its premise that dependent children were better off in non-kin families than in institutions. Brace’s system would be picked up by other child-saving organizations in New York and elsewhere.³³ But the placing-out system looked more like informal adoption arrangements, on the one hand, and indenture, on the other, than what would come to be known in the twentieth century as “foster family care.” Most children who rode the orphan trains were not formally adopted, as adoption was still a rare practice in the late nineteenth-century United States. But Brace thought or hoped that these placements would lead to permanent homes for children. The families who opened their doors to needy children were supposed to raise them as their own, provide them with decent food and clothing, and allow them to go to school.³⁴ Motivations were meant to be charitable, although all parties assumed that children would contribute their labor to the household economy. Child labor had to retain a certain legitimacy for these free home placements to be effective. Children were expected—as was normal in nineteenth-century rural families—to be “useful,” by working. It was considered a “fair bargain” that families would receive help with a variety of tasks in exchange for board, clothing, and a little education.³⁵ Indeed, Megan Birk insists that there were so few differences between indenture and rural free placement that the terms were often used synonymously. Rural placements were often “indentures without the paperwork.”³⁶

Both orphanages and the orphan trains were important precursors to foster family care and have received considerable treatment by historians.³⁷ Yet the lesser-studied practice of “boarding out” had, in many ways, more in common with modern fostering.³⁸ Boarding arrangements were typically informal ones between families, without the involvement of any agency. Under these arrangements, parents facing hardships—such as the death of or abandonment by a spouse, unemployment, or prolonged illness—might temporarily pay another woman to board their children while they waited for circumstances to improve. Like orpha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Into the Family Life of Strangers: The Origins of Foster Family Care
• Chapter 2: The New Deal, Family Security, and the Emergence of a Public Child Welfare System
• Chapter 3: Helping America’s Orphans of War
• Chapter 4: Providing Love and Care: Foster Parents as Parents
• Chapter 5: The Hard-to-Place Child: Family Pathology, Race, and Poverty
• Chapter 6: Compensated Motherhood and the State: Foster Parents as Workers
• Chapter 7: Poverty, Punishment, and Public Assistance: Reorienting Foster Family Care
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index