Happy Saturday, everybody. This week on the show, we talked about the practice babies that were part of home economics programs from the late nineteen to the late nineteen sixties. For the most part, the babies in question had been living in orphanages or other child welfare institutions in a time while things like foster care and social work we're still evolving in the United States. Got me thinking about a previous episode that had some similar context about things that took place even earlier during that whole evolution. That is, the orphan trains, which relocated children, mostly from cities in the US to rural areas. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Chasey V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we are drawing straight from the listener requests. Again. This is an the one that has been requested many, many, many times. It is orphan trains. If you have never heard of orphan trains before, this probably sounds to you like trains full of orphans being taken to new homes, just kind of correct. Between eighteen fifty four and ninety nine, about two hundred and fifty thousand children were taken to new families by train, except they weren't really called orphan trains at all at the time. A lot of the children were not actually orphans, and a lot of times these families who were taking them in were more like employers. So that is a story that we're going to tell today, UH And to get kind of some groundwork lab we're going to start with the context of the situation. After the end of the War of eighteen twelve, the population of the United States, and particularly in the eastern ports cities, really exploded. For example, about forty people lived in New York and eighteen hun rid and by nineteen hundreds, or just a hundred years later, it was close to a million and a half. So many of these new residents were desperately poor and very sick, having arrived with basically nothing from wherever they were immigrating from. UH. And depending on where they were immigrating from, they often faced a lot of prejudice and discrimination, which made it harder for them to find work and get on their feet. As a consequence of this influx of people and poverty, the US saw the rise of its first slums, poverty has had always existed, but now there were entire neighborhoods that were really destitute. They had high crime rates, the buildings were deteriorating, and the circumstances were just apparently hopeless. And that was the prevailing scenario, and an alarming number of the people who lived in these neighborhoods were children. Some of the children really were orphans, uh some had at least one living parent who for whatever reason couldn't or didn't support them, but regardless, by the mid eighteen hundreds, there were somewhere between ten thousand and thirty thousand homeless children living in the slums of New York City, which at that point only had the whole city only had a total population of five thousand people, so that's a pretty significant chunk of the population that are homeless street children. In New York and other cities, children formed gangs to try to keep themselves safe and supported themselves through petty theft and other crime, or even through begging. Others would find work in factories or as newsboys or shoeshine boys, and some sold matches or rags on street corners and in some cases became prostitutes because they kind of wandered like nomads through the city. People referred to these children often as street arabs, and this all kind of calls up images of like scrooges, Street Urgin or Oliver twist Um, And for a lot of children, that's pretty much how it really was, and when no other resources to handle them, cities resorted to incarcerating children in workhouses and prisons that had been meant for adults, but eventually they would build prisons and asylums for juveniles, which were really not much better. The field of social work also barely, if at all, existed at this point. We've done a previous a series of podcasts on Jane Adams, who thought of as the mother of social work. She started doing her groundbreaking work kind of in the middle of when all of this was going on. So there was you know, if if law enforcement found a child who was in danger there it wasn't like there was a social worker or a department of social services they could call for help. There was also no foster care system. Foster care itself did exist, but it was in a very informal way, with individual families taking on children in need and in that sense, fostering has really existed for as long as families have. But there was no organized system for placing children in foster families or for screening potential foster parents, and there were also virtually no adoption laws in the United States at this point. The first adoption law passed in the US was in Massachusetts and that was past in eighteen fifty one. But other than that, there was, you know, before that point, there was no legal governance about how one made it official that this child was now part of your family. So, as a result of all of this and all of these sort of gaps in uh a social way to deal with all these children. Homeless children were a huge issue in many cities, particularly port cities, and the government's in question just didn't have the resources or programs that they would need to do much about it. This brings us to Charles Loring Brace of Hartford, Connecticut. He was a Presbyterian from a middle class family, and he moved to New York City in eighteen forty eight so we could go to seminary. He was really horrified at this situation with homeless and orphaned children, and it was not just because what was happening to these children was horrifying. It was also because he thought that these hordes of unsupervised, marauding children were a threat to the social order. His opinion was that these kids who didn't have families and were kind of left up to their own devices and were often making ends meet for themselves through petty theft and other crime. He just thought they were going to going to grow up into hardened criminal adults, and he became really fixated on them. He would go exploring through the city's poorest neighborhoods and interview them and record their conversations in a journal, and he became really motivated to try to find some way to take care of this problem of homeless children left alone to do as they will. In March of eighteen fifty three, he started the Children Aid Society, and the first programs of the Children's Aid Society were Sunday school and vocational training, and the society also started the United States first home for runaways, the Newsboys Lodging House. Almost immediately though, the Children's Aid Society was just overrun with demand. There were not enough jobs or enough money to provide the services that these children really needed. Um you know, at this point in history, it was pretty normal for children to work in some way, and while they were trying to match up children with jobs, the children vastly outnumbered at the jobs UH, and they did not have the funding to to do more to really help. And Brace wanted to do more, but he didn't just want to build more facilities to handle more children. He thought prisons and asylums were the wrong approach. In his words, quote, the best of all asylums for the outcast child is the farmers home. The great duty is to get these children of unhappy fortune utterly out of their surroundings and to send them away to kind Christian homes in the country. This is kind of alludes to the plan that Brace came up with, which he called the immigration plan. This was that they would gather up children from New York who were homeless or whose parents couldn't care for them, and they would send them west to work on farms. This became known as outplacement. So you're placing children out versus placing them into an orphanage or an institution. He didn't exactly invent the idea of outplacement, UH. The this act of like placing children out with other families existed before, but the Children's Aid Society and brace's influence on it really became the biggest and most well known outplacement effort. So the Children's Aid Society turned its focus to raising money and working through all of the legal requirements involved in finding new homes for children, and to finding the children to send, sometimes working directly with the birth parents themselves. As the Children's Aid Society started sending the children out on trains and the program really started to take off, other agencies followed suit and they placed children from other major cities in the Northeast elsewhere in the United States. And before we talk about what exactly was happening with these trains, let's take a moment for a brief word from a sponsor. So let's take a look at what was going on with the orphans and the trains. So, before being put on the trains, these children would be given new clothes or put into their best clothes if they had clothes that were serviceable. Often this meant that they were in a new outfit that had been provided to them by charity. They were meant to look their best, but depending on how and difficult the journey was, sometimes what really happened was by the time they arrived they were filthy and sick. Someone representing the agency usually went on the train with them, and often another agent had gone ahead to spread the word and begin screening potential parents and assembling a committee of local people, which usually included doctors and clergy, to help with the approvals. Agencies would also distribute leaflets and place advertisements about the children. Here's an example of an ad that ran in Nebraska. In All children received under the care of this association are of special promise in intelligence and health, and are in age from one month to twelve years, and are sent free to those receiving them on ninety days trial, unless a special contract is otherwise made. Homes are wanted for the following children. Eight boys, ages ten, six and four years English parents. Blondes very promising two years old, blonde, fine looking, healthy American, has had his foot straightened, walks now okay. Six years old, dark hair and eyes, good looking at intelligent American. Ten babies boys and girls from one month to three months. One boy. Baby has fine head and face, black eyes and hair, fat and pretty three months old. Agencies also had rules for the placements themselves, here's the Children's Aid Society rule for the placement of boys. Applications must be endorsed by the local Committee. Boys under fifteen years of age, if not legally adopted, must be retained as members of the family and sent to school according to the educational laws of the state until they are eighteen years old. Suitable provisions must then be made for their future. Boys between fifteen and sixteen years of age must be retained as members of the family and sent to school during the winter months until they're seventeen years old, when a mutual arrangement may be made. Boys over sixteen years of age must be retained as members of the family for one year, after which a mutual arrangement may be made. Parties taking boys agree to write to the Society at least once a year, or to have the boys do so. Removals of boys providing unsatisfactory can be arranged through the local committee or an agent of the Society, the party agreeing to retain the boy a reasonable length of time after notifying the Society of the desired change. This kind of reminds me of, uh, when you get a pet through pet rescue, Like yeah, yeah, and obviously this particular set of rules is from after states that started to pass adoption laws, which was actually done in part to kind of curtail the more willy nilly aspects of this placement of children that was going on. Um When the train arrived at a town, the children would be taken to a playhouse or a theater or some other suitable gathering place that had places for spectators and places to display the children, and the children will be paraded across the state for the families to inspect. And so the term up for adoption purportedly comes from this practice of literally putting the children up on stage, and often the whole town would come to watch, whether they wanted a child or not. Sometimes the children would be asked to say something or perform in some way, and the prospective families would ask questions of them and sometimes inspect them in a way that was more reminiscent of buying a horse or a slave. In some towns, demand for these children was really huge, and families would almost come to blows over who could pick from the limited number of children. Foster families were supposed to have references from their pastor or the justice of the peace attesting to their character, but if none was available, the agent in charge would often just judge based on their appearance, their dress, and their demeanor. Children who couldn't find a placement would be put back on the train to be sent on to the next town, or, failing that, would wind up in a local orphanage or some other local facility for homeless children. For most agencies, the record keeping was pretty lax um, The screening was pretty minimal, and depending on who you asked, these people taking in children could be considered parents or they could be considered more like employers. There was also not a lot of follow up after the fact. Travel was really difficult and expensive at this point, which became a big deterrent against sending representatives from the agencies to check up on people. UH. Some of them, like the Children's Aid Society, had planned initially to do in person follow ups on a regular basis, but that never really came to fruition UH, and that pretty much meant that they were relying on the families or the children to send letters back to the agency, which also sometimes happened and sometimes not. And although most of the agencies that were kind of doing these sorts of projects out placing children followed sim sular methods. The Children's Aid Society really got some particular criticisms, and we're going to talk about those after we have a quick word from our sponsor. A lot of agencies, not just the Children's Aid Society, got involved in sending children out west or to some other place by train. Um Charles Loring Brace in particular, though, had some aspects to what he was doing in his philosophy that are kind of problematic. He was really sure that farms were the best places for New York's impoverished children. They would get used to doing honest work there, and they would ideally have the affection and support of a family. And this, I mean, it sounds like an at least well meaning plan on the surface, but there are aspects of it that are pretty problematic. Fewer than half of the children that were sent on the trains by the Children and Aid Society were actually orphans. Roughly a quarter of them had one living parent, and about a quarter had both parents still living, so fifty of them had some parent in the mix. Arguably the living parents couldn't afford to or didn't want to raise their children, or the children are being abused, neglected, or mishandled in some way. Some were also teenagers who were making the step to leave home themselves with the aid of this free passage and clothing and work help that would come without placements. Yeah, I did not find horror stories of like children being taken with no regard to their parents. But I did find ones where the parents were pressured pretty extensively to give up their children for their better good, you know, based on the person who was speaking to them's idea of what would be best for them. Um. His critics argued that Brace was really taking it upon himself to dictate what was best for these children, regardless of the parents feelings or their actual situation. And as a side note, the existence of parents for about half of these children is one reason why the phrase orphan trains wasn't really used at the time. The more common terms for the set up where mercy trains and even baby trains. So one of Brace's actual stated goals was also to provide labor and the less popular populated regions of the United States where people were moving. Uh you know, there were new families who were getting out to somewhere in the West, and uh, you know, in a typical situation, they probably would eventually have children, and the children were eventually helped them on the farm, but they needed that child like that child help now. Um. So for this reason, most of the Children's Aid Society's children were between six and fourteen, so they were old enough to do work, but young enough to still be like trained and educated and maybe not so said in their ways and and obstinate as to cause problems for their new families. Brace also definitely had some monetary motivations, pointing out how much cheaper it was to place children out than to put them into institutions. And the last one is something that he denied, but a lot of people pointed out a lot of the children who went on Children's Aid Society trains were Catholic or Jewish, and a lot of them were also Italian, Polish or Irish, and these were all groups who faced massive amounts of prejudice and discrimination. Um Italian, Polish and Irish people were all viewed as like second class and inferior citizens. The families who received these children were mostly Protestant, and they were mostly not Italian or Polish or Irish, and so critics argued that Brace was trying to kind of strip these children of their religion and their heritage and to force them to assimilate to the culture that he thought was the best one. Um his like this was sort of the response of him being like nah, and his critics being like, yuh huh, Like it does seem a little, uh, a little problematic that that was That was generally how it went. He would say, well, but they're they're just aren't as many, you know, non Protestant people out west, That's why. And people would say, I don't really buy your argument. It definitely like the data set does sort of support a certain prejudice going into it. The Children's Aid Society also did not work with African American children, although exactly why this is the case is not really clear. There were definitely fewer African American homes in the West that could have taken the children. But it's also possible that this whole exercise looked way too much like slavery for anybody to be comfortable sending black children, or it's also very possible that racists did not want that to be part of the system. Yeah, nobody really clearly said why they were not working with African American children. Some of the other outplacement organizations, seeing what Brace was doing and seeing the flaws that people were pointing out in his plan, tried to avoid the controversies that he was generating. So, for example, the New York Foundling Hospital was a Catholic organization and it's since children, including babies and toddlers, a lot of babies and toddler's actually exclusively to Catholic homes. The Boston Home for Little Wanderers also claims that it's screening and follow up processes were much more exact and stringent than Braces were. So um, while the Children's Aid Society was the most well known, there were a lot of other organizations that were into this whole practice, and some of them, either by their own claims or by actual documentation, seemed to have taken more deliberate care with the whole process. Yeah, and while the Children's Aid Society was mostly sending children out to rural farming communities, the New York Foundling Hospital and other agencies replacing children much closer to home, So many of the children who were placed during this time actually stayed in New York. Contrary to the perception that they all went west, and some of the other agencies were definitely more oriented toward children's welfare and not so much with the providing labor aspect of it. So this whole phenomenon of the trains and outplacement it really hinged upon assuming the best in people. So everybody was assuming that the parents who were surrendering their children generally were doing so because they thought it was in the children's best interests uh. And everybody sort of assumed that the parents who were taking in these children really were doing so out of love and charity and not just to get free labor. But in reality, of course, people are not always doing their best, and when it comes to what happened to the children that were involved, it's really something of a mixed bag. Some found themselves genuinely in happy homes when they were loved and cared for, as though they were a member of the family, working alongside other siblings on farms or in family businesses. The whole practice had its share of horror stories too, though they were definitely children who were abused, one whose foster families took them on strictly to act as unpaid manual labor. There were family members who were separated one another, separated from one another, and and the like. There are lots and lots of surviving letters and diaries that tell of children whose parents sent them away with notes that contained their names and their addresses so that they could come back home eventually and stay in touch, only for these notes to be taken away from the children by placement agents as they slept on the trains. That's so heartbreaking. Uh. There are also many, many first person accounts of children who just did not know or understand what was happening to them. Some were too young to really grasp the situation, and others were simply never told what was going on, and in at least some cases, parents seemed to have been pressured, as Tracy mentioned earlier, into surrendering their children when they didn't really want or possibly even need to. Outplaced children also did not necessarily get a warm welcome in their new communities. A lot of people viewed the trained children as they were called, with suspicions. Surely they must have been of poor character or have come from bad families. There were also religious and cultural tensions as Catholic children were placed with Protestant families, and as we were speaking earlier, speaking about earlier ethnic tensions with Irish and Polish and Italian children who were placed into communities that carried prejudices against all of these people, all of these nationalities. So sometimes, you know, somebody, a child would leave a situation where they were homeless and begging out the streets, and they would wind up in the situation where they had food and shelter, but were outcast and faced derision from the community. And there were also cases where foster parents had taken in these children and they truly loved them and you know, raised them as their own, and they lived in this sort of constant fear that someone was going to come and take their child away from them some day. There was finally an independent investigation of the Children's Aid Society in eighteen eighty three, and it found that there was very little screening of the prospective parents and very little supervision of the overall process. A significant number of the older boys who had been outplaced had later run away from home, But overall, the investigators found that for the most part, the children under the age of fourteen who had been outplaced by the Children's Aid Society we're doing okay. Outplaced as a child. Andrew Burke became governor of North Dakota and John Brady became governor of Alaska. They had both been sent to the same town in Indiana on the same day, and the man who adopted John Brady had actually been a judge there. Because records weren't kept very well l while we do have, you know, stories about what some of new children grew up to be, a lot of times the children who had been placed out lost all track of their birth families if those families still lived, and so in you know, more recent years, their children and grandchildren have been trying to trace down the family genealogy and just have been unable to figure out where their parents or grandparents came from before they got on the train. The last train ran on May thirty one, n nine, carrying three children to Sulfur Springs, Texas. And there were several things that kind of worked altogether to really bring an end to this UH approach to outplacement. One was that the Great Depression made the trains financially unsustainable UH, and people began to focus more on local outplacement of children. Prior to that, the trains had gone nearly to every state included in as well as Canada and Mexico. But also a big factor in it was that social agencies had started focusing on trying to keep children with their birth Emily's wherever that was possible. The agencies that had been part of the orphan Train movement later morphed into adoption and foster care agencies as we think of them today, and Brace's idea that children are better off in homes than in institutions continues to be at the heart of today's foster care programs. This movement is often credited for spawning the foster care system as we know it today, and many states adoption laws were put on the books in an effort to rain in Bruce's seemingly haphazard placement of children with families. A lot of the news articles that you will see about the Orphan Trains the American Heritage series that was are the American Heritage uh TV show installment that was about the Orphan Trains. Most of these are from the mid nineties nineties, as the last writers of the Orphan Trains were getting into their eighties and nineties, so very few, if any of the people who were placed out on the trains survived today, but fortunately in and the eighties and nineties, people did a lot of documentation of like oral histories and first person accounts and talking to people who had ridden on the trains and been placed with a new family about their experiences. Today, the Orphan Train Complex and other Orphan train historical and heritage societies try to keep the movement documented and help the descendants of children's who road to trains connect to one another. So a whole lot of people have asked us to talk about orphan trains. Yeah, it's fascinating it. Well, and it turned out to be a whole lot more layered than what I knew of it going into it. I basically knew the orphan trains they took orphans on trains to get new families, and that is pretty reductive. Yeah. Well, and it's one of those things that there are a lot of complex angles to it, Like, wow, the initial impetus for it was surely like a good intent, you know it it ended up doing some not so great things, but also had some legacies that were good. Yeah. Well, and I think one of the things that uh may not have occurred to anyone, or it might not have been nearly as much common knowledge at the time. There have definitely been efforts in multiple places in the world two place minority children with majority families in an effort to make them assimilate um And while that was not this like specified intention of any of the agencies that were running orphan trains, it did have a little bit of that flavor which is troubling. Yeah, it's ah, like I said, good and bad, some good legacy, some very unfortunate circumstances. Thank you so much for joining us today for this Saturday classic. If you have heard any kind of email address there maybe a Facebook you are l during the course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email address again. You can now reach us at history podcast that I heart radio dot com, and we're all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,

Happy Saturday, everybody. This week on the show, we talked about the practice babies that were part of home economics programs from the late nineteen to the late nineteen sixties. For the most part, the babies in question had been living in orphanages or other child welfare institutions in a time while things like foster care and social work we're still evolving in the United States. Got me thinking about a previous episode that had some similar context about things that took place even earlier during that whole evolution. That is, the orphan trains, which relocated children, mostly from cities in the US to rural areas. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Chasey V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we are drawing straight from the listener requests. Again. This is an the one that has been requested many, many, many times. It is orphan trains. If you have never heard of orphan trains before, this probably sounds to you like trains full of orphans being taken to new homes, just kind of correct. Between eighteen fifty four and ninety nine, about two hundred and fifty thousand children were taken to new families by train, except they weren't really called orphan trains at all at the time. A lot of the children were not actually orphans, and a lot of times these families who were taking them in were more like employers. So that is a story that we're going to tell today, UH And to get kind of some groundwork lab we're going to start with the context of the situation. After the end of the War of eighteen twelve, the population of the United States, and particularly in the eastern ports cities, really exploded. For example, about forty people lived in New York and eighteen hun rid and by nineteen hundreds, or just a hundred years later, it was close to a million and a half. So many of these new residents were desperately poor and very sick, having arrived with basically nothing from wherever they were immigrating from. UH. And depending on where they were immigrating from, they often faced a lot of prejudice and discrimination, which made it harder for them to find work and get on their feet. As a consequence of this influx of people and poverty, the US saw the rise of its first slums, poverty has had always existed, but now there were entire neighborhoods that were really destitute. They had high crime rates, the buildings were deteriorating, and the circumstances were just apparently hopeless. And that was the prevailing scenario, and an alarming number of the people who lived in these neighborhoods were children. Some of the children really were orphans, uh some had at least one living parent who for whatever reason couldn't or didn't support them, but regardless, by the mid eighteen hundreds, there were somewhere between ten thousand and thirty thousand homeless children living in the slums of New York City, which at that point only had the whole city only had a total population of five thousand people, so that's a pretty significant chunk of the population that are homeless street children. In New York and other cities, children formed gangs to try to keep themselves safe and supported themselves through petty theft and other crime, or even through begging. Others would find work in factories or as newsboys or shoeshine boys, and some sold matches or rags on street corners and in some cases became prostitutes because they kind of wandered like nomads through the city. People referred to these children often as street arabs, and this all kind of calls up images of like scrooges, Street Urgin or Oliver twist Um, And for a lot of children, that's pretty much how it really was, and when no other resources to handle them, cities resorted to incarcerating children in workhouses and prisons that had been meant for adults, but eventually they would build prisons and asylums for juveniles, which were really not much better. The field of social work also barely, if at all, existed at this point. We've done a previous a series of podcasts on Jane Adams, who thought of as the mother of social work. She started doing her groundbreaking work kind of in the middle of when all of this was going on. So there was you know, if if law enforcement found a child who was in danger there it wasn't like there was a social worker or a department of social services they could call for help. There was also no foster care system. Foster care itself did exist, but it was in a very informal way, with individual families taking on children in need and in that sense, fostering has really existed for as long as families have. But there was no organized system for placing children in foster families or for screening potential foster parents, and there were also virtually no adoption laws in the United States at this point. The first adoption law passed in the US was in Massachusetts and that was past in eighteen fifty one. But other than that, there was, you know, before that point, there was no legal governance about how one made it official that this child was now part of your family. So, as a result of all of this and all of these sort of gaps in uh a social way to deal with all these children. Homeless children were a huge issue in many cities, particularly port cities, and the government's in question just didn't have the resources or programs that they would need to do much about it. This brings us to Charles Loring Brace of Hartford, Connecticut. He was a Presbyterian from a middle class family, and he moved to New York City in eighteen forty eight so we could go to seminary. He was really horrified at this situation with homeless and orphaned children, and it was not just because what was happening to these children was horrifying. It was also because he thought that these hordes of unsupervised, marauding children were a threat to the social order. His opinion was that these kids who didn't have families and were kind of left up to their own devices and were often making ends meet for themselves through petty theft and other crime. He just thought they were going to going to grow up into hardened criminal adults, and he became really fixated on them. He would go exploring through the city's poorest neighborhoods and interview them and record their conversations in a journal, and he became really motivated to try to find some way to take care of this problem of homeless children left alone to do as they will. In March of eighteen fifty three, he started the Children Aid Society, and the first programs of the Children's Aid Society were Sunday school and vocational training, and the society also started the United States first home for runaways, the Newsboys Lodging House. Almost immediately though, the Children's Aid Society was just overrun with demand. There were not enough jobs or enough money to provide the services that these children really needed. Um you know, at this point in history, it was pretty normal for children to work in some way, and while they were trying to match up children with jobs, the children vastly outnumbered at the jobs UH, and they did not have the funding to to do more to really help. And Brace wanted to do more, but he didn't just want to build more facilities to handle more children. He thought prisons and asylums were the wrong approach. In his words, quote, the best of all asylums for the outcast child is the farmers home. The great duty is to get these children of unhappy fortune utterly out of their surroundings and to send them away to kind Christian homes in the country. This is kind of alludes to the plan that Brace came up with, which he called the immigration plan. This was that they would gather up children from New York who were homeless or whose parents couldn't care for them, and they would send them west to work on farms. This became known as outplacement. So you're placing children out versus placing them into an orphanage or an institution. He didn't exactly invent the idea of outplacement, UH. The this act of like placing children out with other families existed before, but the Children's Aid Society and brace's influence on it really became the biggest and most well known outplacement effort. So the Children's Aid Society turned its focus to raising money and working through all of the legal requirements involved in finding new homes for children, and to finding the children to send, sometimes working directly with the birth parents themselves. As the Children's Aid Society started sending the children out on trains and the program really started to take off, other agencies followed suit and they placed children from other major cities in the Northeast elsewhere in the United States. And before we talk about what exactly was happening with these trains, let's take a moment for a brief word from a sponsor. So let's take a look at what was going on with the orphans and the trains. So, before being put on the trains, these children would be given new clothes or put into their best clothes if they had clothes that were serviceable. Often this meant that they were in a new outfit that had been provided to them by charity. They were meant to look their best, but depending on how and difficult the journey was, sometimes what really happened was by the time they arrived they were filthy and sick. Someone representing the agency usually went on the train with them, and often another agent had gone ahead to spread the word and begin screening potential parents and assembling a committee of local people, which usually included doctors and clergy, to help with the approvals. Agencies would also distribute leaflets and place advertisements about the children. Here's an example of an ad that ran in Nebraska. In All children received under the care of this association are of special promise in intelligence and health, and are in age from one month to twelve years, and are sent free to those receiving them on ninety days trial, unless a special contract is otherwise made. Homes are wanted for the following children. Eight boys, ages ten, six and four years English parents. Blondes very promising two years old, blonde, fine looking, healthy American, has had his foot straightened, walks now okay. Six years old, dark hair and eyes, good looking at intelligent American. Ten babies boys and girls from one month to three months. One boy. Baby has fine head and face, black eyes and hair, fat and pretty three months old. Agencies also had rules for the placements themselves, here's the Children's Aid Society rule for the placement of boys. Applications must be endorsed by the local Committee. Boys under fifteen years of age, if not legally adopted, must be retained as members of the family and sent to school according to the educational laws of the state until they are eighteen years old. Suitable provisions must then be made for their future. Boys between fifteen and sixteen years of age must be retained as members of the family and sent to school during the winter months until they're seventeen years old, when a mutual arrangement may be made. Boys over sixteen years of age must be retained as members of the family for one year, after which a mutual arrangement may be made. Parties taking boys agree to write to the Society at least once a year, or to have the boys do so. Removals of boys providing unsatisfactory can be arranged through the local committee or an agent of the Society, the party agreeing to retain the boy a reasonable length of time after notifying the Society of the desired change. This kind of reminds me of, uh, when you get a pet through pet rescue, Like yeah, yeah, and obviously this particular set of rules is from after states that started to pass adoption laws, which was actually done in part to kind of curtail the more willy nilly aspects of this placement of children that was going on. Um When the train arrived at a town, the children would be taken to a playhouse or a theater or some other suitable gathering place that had places for spectators and places to display the children, and the children will be paraded across the state for the families to inspect. And so the term up for adoption purportedly comes from this practice of literally putting the children up on stage, and often the whole town would come to watch, whether they wanted a child or not. Sometimes the children would be asked to say something or perform in some way, and the prospective families would ask questions of them and sometimes inspect them in a way that was more reminiscent of buying a horse or a slave. In some towns, demand for these children was really huge, and families would almost come to blows over who could pick from the limited number of children. Foster families were supposed to have references from their pastor or the justice of the peace attesting to their character, but if none was available, the agent in charge would often just judge based on their appearance, their dress, and their demeanor. Children who couldn't find a placement would be put back on the train to be sent on to the next town, or, failing that, would wind up in a local orphanage or some other local facility for homeless children. For most agencies, the record keeping was pretty lax um, The screening was pretty minimal, and depending on who you asked, these people taking in children could be considered parents or they could be considered more like employers. There was also not a lot of follow up after the fact. Travel was really difficult and expensive at this point, which became a big deterrent against sending representatives from the agencies to check up on people. UH. Some of them, like the Children's Aid Society, had planned initially to do in person follow ups on a regular basis, but that never really came to fruition UH, and that pretty much meant that they were relying on the families or the children to send letters back to the agency, which also sometimes happened and sometimes not. And although most of the agencies that were kind of doing these sorts of projects out placing children followed sim sular methods. The Children's Aid Society really got some particular criticisms, and we're going to talk about those after we have a quick word from our sponsor. A lot of agencies, not just the Children's Aid Society, got involved in sending children out west or to some other place by train. Um Charles Loring Brace in particular, though, had some aspects to what he was doing in his philosophy that are kind of problematic. He was really sure that farms were the best places for New York's impoverished children. They would get used to doing honest work there, and they would ideally have the affection and support of a family. And this, I mean, it sounds like an at least well meaning plan on the surface, but there are aspects of it that are pretty problematic. Fewer than half of the children that were sent on the trains by the Children and Aid Society were actually orphans. Roughly a quarter of them had one living parent, and about a quarter had both parents still living, so fifty of them had some parent in the mix. Arguably the living parents couldn't afford to or didn't want to raise their children, or the children are being abused, neglected, or mishandled in some way. Some were also teenagers who were making the step to leave home themselves with the aid of this free passage and clothing and work help that would come without placements. Yeah, I did not find horror stories of like children being taken with no regard to their parents. But I did find ones where the parents were pressured pretty extensively to give up their children for their better good, you know, based on the person who was speaking to them's idea of what would be best for them. Um. His critics argued that Brace was really taking it upon himself to dictate what was best for these children, regardless of the parents feelings or their actual situation. And as a side note, the existence of parents for about half of these children is one reason why the phrase orphan trains wasn't really used at the time. The more common terms for the set up where mercy trains and even baby trains. So one of Brace's actual stated goals was also to provide labor and the less popular populated regions of the United States where people were moving. Uh you know, there were new families who were getting out to somewhere in the West, and uh, you know, in a typical situation, they probably would eventually have children, and the children were eventually helped them on the farm, but they needed that child like that child help now. Um. So for this reason, most of the Children's Aid Society's children were between six and fourteen, so they were old enough to do work, but young enough to still be like trained and educated and maybe not so said in their ways and and obstinate as to cause problems for their new families. Brace also definitely had some monetary motivations, pointing out how much cheaper it was to place children out than to put them into institutions. And the last one is something that he denied, but a lot of people pointed out a lot of the children who went on Children's Aid Society trains were Catholic or Jewish, and a lot of them were also Italian, Polish or Irish, and these were all groups who faced massive amounts of prejudice and discrimination. Um Italian, Polish and Irish people were all viewed as like second class and inferior citizens. The families who received these children were mostly Protestant, and they were mostly not Italian or Polish or Irish, and so critics argued that Brace was trying to kind of strip these children of their religion and their heritage and to force them to assimilate to the culture that he thought was the best one. Um his like this was sort of the response of him being like nah, and his critics being like, yuh huh, Like it does seem a little, uh, a little problematic that that was That was generally how it went. He would say, well, but they're they're just aren't as many, you know, non Protestant people out west, That's why. And people would say, I don't really buy your argument. It definitely like the data set does sort of support a certain prejudice going into it. The Children's Aid Society also did not work with African American children, although exactly why this is the case is not really clear. There were definitely fewer African American homes in the West that could have taken the children. But it's also possible that this whole exercise looked way too much like slavery for anybody to be comfortable sending black children, or it's also very possible that racists did not want that to be part of the system. Yeah, nobody really clearly said why they were not working with African American children. Some of the other outplacement organizations, seeing what Brace was doing and seeing the flaws that people were pointing out in his plan, tried to avoid the controversies that he was generating. So, for example, the New York Foundling Hospital was a Catholic organization and it's since children, including babies and toddlers, a lot of babies and toddler's actually exclusively to Catholic homes. The Boston Home for Little Wanderers also claims that it's screening and follow up processes were much more exact and stringent than Braces were. So um, while the Children's Aid Society was the most well known, there were a lot of other organizations that were into this whole practice, and some of them, either by their own claims or by actual documentation, seemed to have taken more deliberate care with the whole process. Yeah, and while the Children's Aid Society was mostly sending children out to rural farming communities, the New York Foundling Hospital and other agencies replacing children much closer to home, So many of the children who were placed during this time actually stayed in New York. Contrary to the perception that they all went west, and some of the other agencies were definitely more oriented toward children's welfare and not so much with the providing labor aspect of it. So this whole phenomenon of the trains and outplacement it really hinged upon assuming the best in people. So everybody was assuming that the parents who were surrendering their children generally were doing so because they thought it was in the children's best interests uh. And everybody sort of assumed that the parents who were taking in these children really were doing so out of love and charity and not just to get free labor. But in reality, of course, people are not always doing their best, and when it comes to what happened to the children that were involved, it's really something of a mixed bag. Some found themselves genuinely in happy homes when they were loved and cared for, as though they were a member of the family, working alongside other siblings on farms or in family businesses. The whole practice had its share of horror stories too, though they were definitely children who were abused, one whose foster families took them on strictly to act as unpaid manual labor. There were family members who were separated one another, separated from one another, and and the like. There are lots and lots of surviving letters and diaries that tell of children whose parents sent them away with notes that contained their names and their addresses so that they could come back home eventually and stay in touch, only for these notes to be taken away from the children by placement agents as they slept on the trains. That's so heartbreaking. Uh. There are also many, many first person accounts of children who just did not know or understand what was happening to them. Some were too young to really grasp the situation, and others were simply never told what was going on, and in at least some cases, parents seemed to have been pressured, as Tracy mentioned earlier, into surrendering their children when they didn't really want or possibly even need to. Outplaced children also did not necessarily get a warm welcome in their new communities. A lot of people viewed the trained children as they were called, with suspicions. Surely they must have been of poor character or have come from bad families. There were also religious and cultural tensions as Catholic children were placed with Protestant families, and as we were speaking earlier, speaking about earlier ethnic tensions with Irish and Polish and Italian children who were placed into communities that carried prejudices against all of these people, all of these nationalities. So sometimes, you know, somebody, a child would leave a situation where they were homeless and begging out the streets, and they would wind up in the situation where they had food and shelter, but were outcast and faced derision from the community. And there were also cases where foster parents had taken in these children and they truly loved them and you know, raised them as their own, and they lived in this sort of constant fear that someone was going to come and take their child away from them some day. There was finally an independent investigation of the Children's Aid Society in eighteen eighty three, and it found that there was very little screening of the prospective parents and very little supervision of the overall process. A significant number of the older boys who had been outplaced had later run away from home, But overall, the investigators found that for the most part, the children under the age of fourteen who had been outplaced by the Children's Aid Society we're doing okay. Outplaced as a child. Andrew Burke became governor of North Dakota and John Brady became governor of Alaska. They had both been sent to the same town in Indiana on the same day, and the man who adopted John Brady had actually been a judge there. Because records weren't kept very well l while we do have, you know, stories about what some of new children grew up to be, a lot of times the children who had been placed out lost all track of their birth families if those families still lived, and so in you know, more recent years, their children and grandchildren have been trying to trace down the family genealogy and just have been unable to figure out where their parents or grandparents came from before they got on the train. The last train ran on May thirty one, n nine, carrying three children to Sulfur Springs, Texas. And there were several things that kind of worked altogether to really bring an end to this UH approach to outplacement. One was that the Great Depression made the trains financially unsustainable UH, and people began to focus more on local outplacement of children. Prior to that, the trains had gone nearly to every state included in as well as Canada and Mexico. But also a big factor in it was that social agencies had started focusing on trying to keep children with their birth Emily's wherever that was possible. The agencies that had been part of the orphan Train movement later morphed into adoption and foster care agencies as we think of them today, and Brace's idea that children are better off in homes than in institutions continues to be at the heart of today's foster care programs. This movement is often credited for spawning the foster care system as we know it today, and many states adoption laws were put on the books in an effort to rain in Bruce's seemingly haphazard placement of children with families. A lot of the news articles that you will see about the Orphan Trains the American Heritage series that was are the American Heritage uh TV show installment that was about the Orphan Trains. Most of these are from the mid nineties nineties, as the last writers of the Orphan Trains were getting into their eighties and nineties, so very few, if any of the people who were placed out on the trains survived today, but fortunately in and the eighties and nineties, people did a lot of documentation of like oral histories and first person accounts and talking to people who had ridden on the trains and been placed with a new family about their experiences. Today, the Orphan Train Complex and other Orphan train historical and heritage societies try to keep the movement documented and help the descendants of children's who road to trains connect to one another. So a whole lot of people have asked us to talk about orphan trains. Yeah, it's fascinating it. Well, and it turned out to be a whole lot more layered than what I knew of it going into it. I basically knew the orphan trains they took orphans on trains to get new families, and that is pretty reductive. Yeah. Well, and it's one of those things that there are a lot of complex angles to it, Like, wow, the initial impetus for it was surely like a good intent, you know it it ended up doing some not so great things, but also had some legacies that were good. Yeah. Well, and I think one of the things that uh may not have occurred to anyone, or it might not have been nearly as much common knowledge at the time. There have definitely been efforts in multiple places in the world two place minority children with majority families in an effort to make them assimilate um And while that was not this like specified intention of any of the agencies that were running orphan trains, it did have a little bit of that flavor which is troubling. Yeah, it's ah, like I said, good and bad, some good legacy, some very unfortunate circumstances. Thank you so much for joining us today for this Saturday classic. 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