Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (19 page)

Siblings were often separated, and CAS discouraged the children from communicating with blood relatives, recommending instead a clean break with the past. Many older kids quickly hightailed it out of their new homes, but whether they fled due to mistreatment or adolescent restlessness wasn’t always clear. Undoubtedly some discovered that whatever romantic notions they had entertained (or been told) about pastoral life didn’t prepare them for its arduous realities.

Despite a public perception that the children were orphans, a significant percentage had mothers and fathers who, although destitute, still loved them. Parents intent on finding their children encountered one obstacle after another. Agency records were shoddy and disorganized, and many children were filed under “whereabouts unknown” or had acquired new names from their present guardians. A mother hoping to reclaim her son who’d been placed far from his home in New York was brusquely told he had “no desire to return.” But when the boy heard that his birth mother wanted to reunite with him, he was out the front door and Manhattan-bound.

Brace himself acknowledged that more follow-up was needed, and CAS made improvements over the years (and later revolutionized foster
care in America). But logistically and financially it was impossible to check on every child. Visiting a single farm or prairie house could take days, and CAS was too short-staffed and underfunded to cover so much territory.

Catholics were among Brace’s earliest and most vociferous opponents. Brace, a strict Protestant, had written crude statements about Catholicism in general, but what most angered various priests and bishops was CAS’s habit of sending Catholic children to Protestant families. Levi Silliman Ives, founder of the Catholic Protectory, excoriated CAS in his organization’s annual report:

Brace argued that, when possible, CAS tried to match Catholic children with Catholic adults, but there just weren’t enough Catholic parents to meet the demand. Brace also had to contend with the prejudices of the times; like the majority of Americans, most sponsors were white and Protestant, and they wanted white, Protestant children. Ironically, a Catholic agency got into trouble when it tried to institute its own placing-out system and was accused of changing the surnames of Jewish children and sending them to live with Catholic families.

The harshest criticism leveled at Brace was that his efforts were comparable to the most heinous evil of the day—slavery. Along with the
humiliating physical examinations the children had to endure publicly and the splitting apart of families, there were the often backbreaking working conditions. “If some Missionary Agent had taken that many little negroes from the plantations of Louisiana to Springfield or Jacksonville, and should have prepared to do the very thing with them that everybody knows will be done directly or indirectly with these poor children from New York,” one newspaper editor raged, “our good abolitionist friends … would all have fainted at the horrid thought.” Although Brace prohibited the practice, other placing-out programs inspired by CAS allowed children to become indentured servants, legally binding them to their sponsors for a set period.

Retracing the same route the children would have taken when they arrived in Dowagiac, Kay and I walk down West Railroad Street, hang a left at Commercial, and pass the district library where Kay works.

“What a cool little building,” I say, looking at the Carnegie-funded library. It’s an unusual mixture of modern and classical styles, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Kay isn’t sure of the architectural design either but informs me that residents had a critical decision to make before construction began: Andrew Carnegie stipulated that the community had to contribute an annual appropriation for operating costs, and Dowagiac had only enough money to pay for either the library or a new hospital.

“And they chose the library,” I say. “Wow, those are some hard-core book lovers.”

“We did get a hospital eventually,” Kay informs me.

Half a block away is the Beckwith Theatre. “The original building is gone,” Kay says, “but the meetinghouse used to be here.”

Spelled out on the Beckwith’s marquee in black lettering is this week’s show:
The Uninvited
.

No other stop on my itinerary, I tell Kay, resonates with me as personally as this one because I myself happen to be adopted. Not “plucked off the streets and shipped halfway across the country” adopted, but
adopted nonetheless. Three days old at the time, I was placed by an agency into an unconditionally loving family, and I’d like to think that my experience, although wholly positive, has made me more sensitive to those whose experiences were not.

Which is why my immediate reaction to the orphan-train story was so negative. Abruptly uprooting children from the only community they’ve ever known, thrusting them into a series of degrading physical evaluations and potential rejections, and entrusting them to someone who’s received less screening than your average bank-loan applicant seemed to me grossly irresponsible, if not criminal.

Kay reminds me to consider that “people had a different way of thinking back then,” and that by all accounts Brace’s motives were pure.

From everything I’ve read about Brace and CAS, this does seem to be true. Even his fiercest critics never accused him of corruption or selfishness. And in stark contrast to the eugenicist Madison Grant, Brace didn’t believe that heredity determined one’s worth as a human being. “The moral Brotherhood of man does not depend on community of descent, but on a common nature, a similar destiny, and a like relation to their common Father—God,” Brace wrote in 1863, expressing a sentiment that Grant would probably have found emetic. Putting children into stable homes, Brace thought, would allow them to flourish. Every placement might have been a gamble, but Brace saw the alternative as guaranteed misery. Today it’s hard to imagine thousands of children sleeping in doorways and picking through rotted trash heaps for anything edible, but this was reality in nineteenth-century American cities. Boys got drawn into criminal gangs, and young girls were forced into prostitution. There were orphanages and group homes, but many were cramped, unventilated breeding grounds of disease and abuse.

And while CAS administrators received blistering mail from grown orphan-train riders denouncing them for various transgressions, they also opened their share of appreciative letters. “I shall ever acknowledge with gratitude that the Children’s Aid Society has been the instrument of my elevation,” wrote a Yale University sophomore. “To be taken
from the gutters of New York City and placed in a college is almost a miracle.” Others sent in donations with their letters to repay the cost of their train ticket.

It’s also only fair to note that foster care and adoption horror stories can be cherry-picked from today’s headlines as well. Months before I left for Niihau, Hawaii, my hometown paper, the
Washington Post
, ran this grisly item:
WOMAN IS CHARGED IN DEATHS OF 2 GIRLS: CHILDREN WERE FOUND IN ADOPTIVE MOTHER’S FREEZER LAST YEAR
.

In 1895, Michigan became the first state to start clamping down on placing-out programs, followed by Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, and Nebraska. But the children’s welfare didn’t seem to be the primary concern of legislators. “We cannot afford to have the state made a dumping ground for the dependent children of other states, especially New York,” Kansas governor William Stanley declared, echoing the frustrations of elected officials throughout the west. Increasingly, small towns were coping with an influx of “big-city” crimes such as prostitution and murder as their populations swelled, and they had their own abandoned and needy boys and girls to care for.

Officially, placing out ended in 1929; most states had made the practice illegal and cities were offering better social services to poverty-stricken families so they wouldn’t have to be separated. But a few orphans were still being put on trains as late as 1930.

The story of Alice Bullis, one of the very last riders, is emblematic of the program’s contradictions. Bullis had been an orphan in New York for two years before she was transported to Kansas. “[We] were shipped like cattle,” she recalled. “The adult agents who accompanied the children dressed them up and groomed them like livestock for a show. They taught them little poems and songs to present to their prospective owners.” Bullis had to be removed from her first two homes because the men tried to molest her. “None of these people took me in because they wanted someone to love,” she continued. “They just wanted me for work, and for whatever those old men wanted.” Her
luck changed when she fell in love with a high school classmate named Donald Ayler. They married when she turned twenty and eventually settled in Oklahoma City. “Everything happens for a reason,” Alice Ayler said, looking back on her life. “I have been married to the same man for fifty-four years, proved that I had brains, and I have spent my life helping others. Some people are bitter about the trains, but not me. Even though there were some hard times, it probably saved my life.”

WHEN DONALD MURPHY
, California’s Department of Parks and Recreation director, read the complaint insisting that Madison Grant’s name be stripped from the Founders Tree plaque in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, he didn’t pass it off to an assistant or send back a perfunctory form letter. Instead, he personally composed a thoughtful, nuanced reply. “Is it ‘historically bizarre’ to commemorate Grant’s undeniable efforts on behalf of conservation in light of his undeniable racism?” Murphy asked near the beginning of his lengthy response.

Murphy went on to explain why he took this so seriously:

I’ve been carrying Murphy’s letter with me during this entire leg of my journey, which started in Northern California and ends here
in Oklahoma City, and I’ve read it numerous times now. Whether or not the plaque should be removed is a tough call. Murphy is absolutely correct that Madison Grant wasn’t alone in his views. President Teddy Roosevelt, birth control activist (and Planned Parenthood founder) Margaret Sanger, John Kellogg of breakfast-cereal fame, and Alexander Graham Bell, a lifelong advocate for deaf individuals who nevertheless believed they shouldn’t marry lest they reproduce hearing-impaired offspring, were just a handful of illustrious Americans who endorsed some variation of selective breeding. But none of them, it’s worth noting, collaborated with the Nazis or promoted eugenics as zealously as Grant. This might be a difference of degree rather than kind, but it’s a difference nonetheless.

Ultimately, I side with Murphy on not removing the plaque. It’s relatively small and unobtrusive and mostly states a historical fact—that Grant and two other men (also eugenics supporters) founded the Redwoods park—and doesn’t exalt them as all-around super-great guys. In an ideal world there’d be a marker here that addresses the more appalling aspects of Grant’s past. Although that, admittedly, might be a bit of a buzzkill in such an otherwise uplifting environment.

This whole issue also raises the question of what causes one generation of Americans to wrap its arms around noxious ideologies, while their descendants cast them off as repugnant. Social progress rarely moves forward with swift and deliberate speed but tends, it seems, to advance in fits and starts. Ideally, minds are changed when voices of conscience challenge the nation to live up to its fundamental principles. While it’s true that eugenics enjoyed widespread approval in the early 1900s, its acceptance was by no means universal.