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Public Assistance and Social Welfare
Contents
The Poorhouse >
Outdoor Relief > Children's Law
of 1875 > Child Saving > Home
Relief > The New Deal > Aliens
and the WPA > The War on Poverty
> Welfare Policy Today
Children's Law of 1875
In its Seventh Annual Report (1874) the New
York State Commissioners of Public Charities asserted, "There
can be no question that the county poor-house is an entirely unsuitable
place in which to rear and educate children." The board elaborated
the fate of children in the poorhouses:
"Degrading and vicious influences
surround them in these institutions, corrupting to both body
and soul. They quickly fall into ineradicable habits of idleness,
which prepare them for a life of pauperism and crime. Their
moral and religious training is in most cases, entirely neglected,
and their secular education is of the scantiest and superficial
kind. Self-respect is, in time, almost extinguished, and a prolonged
residence in a poorhouse leaves upon them a stigma which clings
to them in after years, and carries its unhappy influences through
life."1
Although family breakup appeared as a reform strategy in Philadelphia
as early as the 1820s, it exercised its greatest influence during
the 1870s and 1880s as part of the campaign to move children out
of the poorhouse. By the 1870s, many charity reformers had decided
that only by severing the bonds between pauper parents and their
children could they prevent the spread of dependence from one generation
to another. Although adults often proved impossible to reform, their
children were malleable. If placed in a better environment at an
early age, reformers held that even the children of paupers could
aspire to independence and self-sufficiency.2
In 1875, the New York State Legislature passed the Children's Act,
which ordered the removal of all children between two and sixteen
from the poorhouses. As passed in 1875, the Children's Act ordered
children placed in institutions "governed or controlled by
officers or persons of the same religious faith as the parents of
the child, as far as practicable."3
Given conditions in most poorhouses, children probably did receive
better care elsewhere, even without their parents. Nonetheless,
other alternatives did exist. One was an adequate standard of outdoor
relief. The other was to create reasonable family housing within
poorhouses. Neither was impossible to implement or considerably
more expensive. A central goal of relief policy, however, was family
breakup.4
If she had found herself facing utter destitutition in 1875, Natalie
Gumpertz' turn to the poorhouse for help would have yielded similar
fates for her three daughters. Having thrown herself on the mercy
of public and private charity officials, what remained of Natalie's
family would have been further broken up. While Natalie may have
entered the almshouse on Randall's Island, Rosa, Nannie, and Olga
might have been sent to the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum,
for example.5
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) had
been formed in 1874 in NY to enforce existing laws by searching
out child neglect and abuse, prosecuting parents, and turning children
over to the appropriate agency. The SPCC came to be known by the
poor as "the Cruelty." But with the passage of the 1875
law, no longer did parents need to commit a crime, act immorally,
or abuse their offspring before reformers urged authorities to step
in and remove their children. Extreme poverty itself had become
evidence of their incompetence and adequate grounds on which to
break up their families. These laws and agencies represented and
embodied the prevailing consensus that the most effective manner
to root out pauperism was to break up families. At the same time
the SPCC fomented suspicion, hostility, and disunity among the poor
of great cities by encouraging neighbors to spy on and accuse one
another.6
Although no one could deny that almshouses/poorhouses were awful
places for children or that many poor children were neglected and
mistreated, the removal of children from almshouses, like the attack
on outdoor relief and the break up of poor families, reflected the
hostility and contempt of the respectable classes and their horror
at the prospect of a united, militant working class.7
A new doctrine, scientific charity, and its organizational embodiment,
charity organization justified and helped implement this emerging
structure of relief. Allegedly supported by theory and data, within
less than two decades, most public officials and social welfare
professionals knew that family breakup, poorhouse reform, and scientific
charity all had failed, and in the 1890s, under the guise of child-saving,
Progressive era reformers suddenly switched strategies.8
During the last quarter of the 19th century, relief institutions
posed a critical problem because they had increased dramatically
in number and size. In New York City, the number of orphanages increased
300 percent between 1860 and 1895. The New York Charities Directory
for 1890 listed 49 "Homes for Children." On the national
level, a special report of the 1910 U.S. Census claimed that 110,000
"dependent, neglected, and delinquent children" lived
in 1,151 institutions across the country."9
1
Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History
of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 107.
2 Katz, ch. 4 .
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
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