MARIAN J. MORTON
Homes for Poverty's Children:
Cleveland's Orphanages, 1851-1933
Orphanages were first and foremost
responses to the poverty of
children. Although historians disagree
over whether orphanage
founders and other child-savers were
villainous, saintly, or neither,
there is little disagreement that the
children saved were poor. When
this becomes the focus of the story,
orphans appear less as victims of
middle-class attempts to control or
uplift them than as victims of
poverty; orphanages emerge less as
punitive or ameliorative institu-
tions than as poorhouses for children,
and a history of Cleveland's
orphans and orphanages is less about the
struggle to restore social
order or evangelize the masses than
about the persistence of poverty in
urban America.1
Today Cleveland's three major child-care
facilities are residential
treatment centers which provide
psychiatric services for children with
emotional or behavioral problems. These
same facilities, from their late
nineteenth-century beginnings to the
Great Depression, however, were
Marian J. Morton is Professor of History
at John Carroll University.
1. Historians critical of child-savers
include the following: David J. Rothman, The
Discovery of Asylum: Order and
Disorder in the Early Republic (Boston,
1980); Steven
L. Schossman, Love and tile American
Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of
"Progressive" Juvenile
Justice, 1825-1920 (Chicago, 1977);
Anthony M. Platt, The Child
Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago, 1977); Ellen Ryerson, The Best-Laid
Plans: America's Juvenile Court
Experiment (New York, 1978), and
Michael B. Katz,
Poverty and Policy in American
History (New York, London, 1983) and In
the Shadow
of the Poorhouse: A Social History of
Welfare in America (New York, 1986).
More
positive evaluations include Susan
Tiffin, In Whose Best Interest: Child Welfare Reform
in the Progressive Era (Westport, Conn., 1982); Robert H. Bremner, "Other
People's
Children," Journal of Social
History, 16 (Spring, 1983), 83-104; Michael W. Sherraden
and Susan Whitelaw Downs, "The
Orphan Asylum in the Nineteenth Century," Social
Service Review, 57 (June, 1983), 272-90, and Peter L. Tyor and Jamil S.
Zainaldin,
"Asylum and Society: An Approach to
Institutional Change, Journal of Social History,
13 (Fall, 1979), 23-48. A sensitive and
balanced portrait of child-savers and child-saving
institutions is provided by LeRoy Ashby,
Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent
Children, 1890-1917 (Philadelphia, 1984). An excellent review of the
literature on
child-saving is Clarke A. Chambers,
"Toward a Redefinition of Welfare History,"
Journal of American History, 73 (September, 1986), 416-18.
6 OHIO HISTORY
orphanages which provided shelter for
poor children: the Cleveland
Orphan Asylum (founded in 1852 and
renamed in 1875 the Cleveland
Protestant Orphan Asylum), which is now
Beech Brook; St. Mary's
Female Asylum (1851) and St. Joseph's
Orphan Asylum (1863), run by
the Ladies of the Sacred Heart of Mary,
and St. Vincent's Asylum
(1853) under the direction of the
Sisters of Charity, now merged as
Parmadale; and the Jewish Orphan Asylum
(1869), now Bellefaire,
founded by the Independent Order of
B'nai B'rith for the children of
Jewish Civil War veterans of Ohio and
surrounding states.2
During the period of the orphanages'
foundings, Cleveland exempli-
fied both the promises of wealth and the
risks of poverty characteristic
of nineteenth-century America. During
the Civil War the city began its
rapid transformation from a small
commercial village to an industrial
metropolis. Cleveland's established
merchants and industrialists built
their magnificent mansions east on
Euclid Avenue, migrating out from
the heart of the city where imposing
hotels and commercial buildings
had been newly built on the Public
Square.3
The booming economy also attracted
thousands of newcomers from
the countryside and from Europe to labor
in the city's foundries, sail its
lake vessels, and build its railroads.
Rapid population growth and the
incursion of railroads and factories
into poorer neighborhoods, how-
ever, caused overcrowding and heightened
the possibilities of fatal or
crippling disease. Migrants often
arrived with little money and few job
skills that would be useful in the city.
Employment, even for skilled
workmen, was often sporadic. Cleveland
also suffered from the
economic downturns experienced by the
rest of the country. But the
bank failures of the mid-1850s and the
railroad overspeculation of the
1870s caused the hardest times for
Cleveland's working people.4
2. The founding of the Cleveland
Protestant Orphan Asylum is described in Mike
McTighe, "Leading Men, True Women,
Protestant Churches, and the Shape of
Antebellum Benevolence," in David
D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski, eds.,
Cleveland: A Tradition of Reform, (Kent, Ohio, 1985), 20-24. On the Catholic orphan-
ages, see Michael J. Hynes, History
of the Diocese of Cleveland: Origin and Growth
(Cleveland, 1953), 90-94, and Donald P.
Gavin, In All Things Charity: A History of the
Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine,
Cleveland, Ohio, 1851-1954 (Milwaukee,
1955),
19-36; and on the Jewish Orphan Asylum,
see Gary Polster, "A Member of the Herd:
Growing Up in the Cleveland Jewish
Orphan Asylum, 1868-1919" (Ph.D. Dissertation,
Case Western Reserve University, 1984),
and Michael Sharlitt, As I Remember: The
Home in My Heart (Cleveland, 1959).
3. Edmund H. Chapman, Cleveland:
Village to Metropolis (Cleveland, 1981),
97-150.
4. William Ganson Rose, Cleveland:
The Making of a City (Cleveland, 1950), 230.
363.
Homes for Poverty's Children 7
Because there was no social insurance,
family was the only safe-
guard against disaster. But family
obligations were loosened in the city
where the traditional constraints of
church and village were missing.
And when family resources were gone,
individuals-sometimes adults
and often children-fell ready victims to
poverty.5
Americans had traditionally aided the
poor with outdoor relief, the
distribution of food, clothing, or fuel
by the local government and by
private organizations. By the
mid-nineteenth century, however, many
philanthropists and public officials had
come to believe that outdoor
relief actually encouraged pauperism and
that the poor might be better
cared for in institutions where job
skills, the love of labor, and other
middle-class virtues might be taught,
thus preventing further depen-
dence.6
Accordingly, both the private and public
sectors expanded existing
institutions or opened new ones for the
dependent poor. In 1856 the
city of Cleveland opened an enlarged
poorhouse or Infirmary, which
housed the ill, insane, and aged, as
well as those who were simply
poverty-stricken. In 1867 the city's
oldest private relief organization,
the Western Seamen's Friend Society,
founded the Bethel Union,
which opened two facilities for the
homeless. Both were sustained
financially by funds from local
Protestant churches, and their purpose
was to convert as well as to shelter the
poor and needy.7
The private orphanages were an outgrowth
of the conviction that
dependent children and adults should not
be housed together in an
undifferentiated facility. Although most
Ohio counties eventually
administered county children's homes, Cuyahoga
County did not, and
the city of Cleveland, therefore,
continued to be responsible for
dependent children. In 1856 the
Infirmary had about 25 school-aged
children in residence who not only
shared the building with the
violently insane and the syphilitic, but
who received only four months
of schooling during the year because no
teacher was available. Like the
common schools, therefore, orphanages
were intended to be institu-
tions exclusively for children, with a
mission derived both from their
sectarian origins and from the poverty
of their inmates.8
5. Chambers, "Redefinition of
Welfare History," 421-22.
6. According to Rothman, The
Discovery of Asylum, 185, institutionalization "dom-
inated the public response to poverty."
See also Katz, Poverty and Policy, 55-89, and In
the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 3-35.
7. Rose, Cleveland, 230; Florence
T. Waite, A Warm Friendfor the Spirit: A History
of the Family Service Association of
Cleveland and its Forebears, 1830-1952 (Cleveland,
1960), 3-10.
8. Homer Folks, The Care of
Destitute, Neglected, and Delinquent Children
8 OHIO HISTORY
Most children sheltered in Cleveland's
orphanages were orphaned
by the poverty of a single parent, not
by the death of both; that is, they
were "half orphans." Most
common perhaps was the plight of the
widowed or deserted mother forced to
give up her children because she
could not support them herself: for
example, the nine-year old Irish
boy, whose father was "killed on
the R.R. [railroad] and [whose]
mother bound him over" to St.
Vincent's until his eighteenth birthday
with the hope that he would learn a
trade. There were few jobs for
working-class women besides domestic
service, which paid little and
did not allow a woman to live at home
with her children. Many
widowers, on the other hand, were
unable to both provide a home for
their children and earn a living.9
Many orphans were the children of the
city's new arrivals from the
country or Europe, whose Old World
customs or rural habits left them
unable to cope with American urban
life. The Protestant Orphan
Asylum annual report of 1857 claimed
orphans "from every part of the
Old World." The register of St.
Mary's noted children from Ireland,
Germany, and England, and the Jewish
Orphan Asylum, from Russia
and Austria.10
Illness or accidents on the job also
impoverished families by causing
hours lost on the job and consequent
loss of wages at a time when
working-class men probably earned
barely subsistence wages. A
cholera epidemic in 1849 provided the
immediate impetus for the
founding of the Protestant Orphan
Asylum.11
At best, employment for Cleveland's
working class might be season-
al or intermittent. Construction
workers and longshoremen, for exam-
ple, were laid off in the winter,
leaving them unable to provide for their
(London, 1902), 73-81; Robert H.
Bremner, ed., Children and Youth in America: A
Documentary History, Vol. I, (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 631-32. The local
reference is
City of Cleveland, Annual Report,
1856 (Cleveland, 1856), 38.
9. The predominance of
"half-orphans" has been noted as early as the 1870s: see
Rachel B. Marks, "Institutions for
Dependent and Neglected Children: Histories,
Nineteenth-Century Statistics and
Recurrent Goals" in Donnell M. Pappenfort et al.,
eds., Social Policy and the
Institution (Chicago. 1973), 32. The local reference is to St.
Vincent's Asylum Registry, Book A,
Cleveland Catholic Diocesan Archives, Cleveland,
Ohio, n.p.
10. Cleveland Orphan Asylum, Annual
Report, 1857 (Cleveland, 1857), 4. (Hereinaf-
ter this orphanage will be referred to
by its later name, the Cleveland Protestant Orphan
Asylum); St. Mary's Female Asylum
[labeled St. Joseph's], et passim, Cleveland
Catholic Diocesan Archives; Jewish
Orphan Asylum Annual Reports, 1869-1900 et
passim. (These
papers are at the Western Reserve Historical Society under the
institution's later name, Bellefaire, MS
3665.)
11. Cleveland Herald, November
12, 1849, n.p. in Scrapbook 1, at Beech Brook
(formerly the Cleveland Protestant
Orphan Asylum), Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
Homes for Poverty's Children 9 |
|
families or compelling them to migrate elsewhere in search of employ- ment. The Protestant Orphan Asylum annual report in 1857 noted: "Many now under the care of this Society were cast upon its charity by mere sojourners whose children have been left at the Infirmary." "Father on the lake," often commented the register of St. Joseph's, suggesting that the mother was left to fend for herself.12 The difficulties of earning a steady and substantial living were compounded by the recessions and depressions which occurred in each of the last three decades of the nineteenth-century. The depression of 1893 was the worst the country had suffered thus far and strained the relief capacities of both private and public agencies in Cleveland and other cities. The depression was felt immediately by all institutions
12. Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, Annual Report, 1857 (Cleveland, 1857), 4; St. Joseph's Admissions Book, 1884-1894, Cleveland Catholic Diocesan Archives. Sherraden and Downs, "The Orphan Asylum," pinpoints transience as the most common characteristic of orphans' families. |
10 OHIO HISTORY
which cared for dependent persons,
especially for children, as record-
ed in the Jewish Orphan Asylum
superintendent's report from 1893:
"The business crisis, sweeping like
a fierce storm over our country
through its length and breadth, has made
its influence felt also in the
affairs of our Asylum. Since its
existence we have not received so
many new inmates [121] as in the year
past." St. Mary's register
includes this vignette from 1893:
"Father dead, Mother is living; later
went to the Poor House at
Cleveland."13
Because nineteenth-century Americans
blamed poverty on individ-
ual vice or immorality, they readily
assumed that poor adults were
neglectful and poor children were
ill-behaved. Dependency and delin-
quency were synonymous for all practical
purposes: the Protestant
Orphan Asylum commented in 1880 that
"the greater proportion [of
children admitted] have come from homes
of destitution and neglect-
innocent sufferers from parental
mismanagement or wrongdoing." 14
The Cleveland Humane Society, the city's
chief child-placing agen-
cy, was empowered to remove a child from
its parents' home to an
institution if they were judged
neglectful or abusive, and some parents
were. The Humane Society sent to the
Protestant Orphan Asylum a
boy who had been taken to the police
station by his mother and
stepfather "for the purpose of
inducing the Court to send him to the
House of Corrections," the local
detention facility. A few parents
simply abandoned their offspring, as did
the "unnatural mother" who
in 1854 left her three-year-old son in a
priest's parlor.15 Many parents
were described-probably accurately-as
"drunkards" or "intem-
perate."
Orphanages' policies and practices
indicate their mission to relieve
and remedy poverty. The Protestant
Orphan Asylum took in children
from the city Infirmary and received
some funds from the city,
acknowledging the orphanage's poor
relief responsibilities. Although
neither the Catholic nor the Jewish
institutions got public aid, they
were supported by the Catholic Diocese
and the B'nai B'rith, which
were welfare agencies for those
denominations. The poor relief role of
the Jewish Orphan Asylum was implicit in
its by-laws, which required
13. Bellefaire, MS 3665, Jewish Orphan
Asylum, Annual Report, 1893, 23, Container
15; St. Joseph's Registry, 1883-1904,
n.p., Cleveland Catholic Diocesan Archives. On
the impact of the Depression of 1893 on
public and private relief agencies, see Katz, In
the Shadow, 147-50.
14. Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, Annual
Report, 1880 (Cleveland, 1880), 6.
15. Children's Services, MS 4020,
Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland
Humane Society, Scrapbook, Minutes, Nov.
26, 1881, Container 1; St. Mary's Registry
Book [labeled St. Joseph's] 1854, n.p.,
Cleveland Catholic Diocesan Archives.
Homes for Poverty's Children 11
that no orphans could be received
"who have adequate means of
support, nor any half orphan whose
living parent is able to support the
same."16
Also indicative of this role was the
orphanages' practice in their early
decades of "placing out" or
indenturing children to families which
were supposed to teach the child a trade
or provide some formal
education in return for help in the
household. Indenture had been a
traditional American way of dealing with
the children of the poor since
the colonial period and was routinely
used by the Infirmary. A printed
circular from the Protestant Orphan
Asylum advertised: "Forty bright
attractive boys from one month to 8
years of age for whom homes are
desired. We also have a few nice girls
under ten and a few baby
girls." 17
The orphanages' primary official goal
was religious instruction and
conversion. Sectarian rivalries were an
important stimulus for the
founding and maintenance of the
orphanages, as each denomination
strove to restore or convert children to
its own faith. But because most
Americans identified poverty with moral
weakness or vice, religious
conversion was seen not only as a way of
saving souls but as a logical
remedy for dependence. Religious
services were daily and mandatory:
"Each day shall begin and end with
worship," noted the Protestant
Orphan Asylum. Children at the Jewish
Orphan Asylum were taught
Hebrew and Jewish history. The registers
of the Catholic orphanages
noted whether the parents were
Protestant or Catholic and when the
child made first communion.18
Orphanage administrators also saw the
practical need to provide
children with a common school education
and especially vocational
training. Children from the Protestant
Orphan Asylum and the Jewish
16. "The Cleveland Protestant
Orphan Asylum, An Outline History," n.d., n.p. at
Beech Brook; Bellefaire, MS. 3665,
Bylaws of the Jewish Orphan Asylum, Container 1,
Folder 1. The public funding of private
child-care institutions is noted also in Folks, The
Care of Destitute, and Bremner, ed., Children and Youth, Vol. 1,
663-64.
17. Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum
annual reports note such indentures through
the 1870s; an indenture agreement is
contained in Scrapbook 2 at Beech Brook. The
advertisement is found in
"Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum," Vertical file,
Western Reserve Historical Society. On
the custom of indenturing pauper children, see
Folks, The Care of Destitute, 39-41;
Bremner, Children and Youth, Vol. 1, 631-46;
Michael Grossberg, Governing the
Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century
America (Chapel Hill, 1985), 266-67. Tyor and Zainaldin,
"Asylum and Society," 27-30,
discuss similar placement practices at
the Temporary Home for the Indigent.
18. Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, Annual
Report, 1875 (Cleveland, 1875), 22;
Bellefaire, MS 3665, Jewish Orphan
Asylum, Annual Report, 1874, 15, Container 1,
Folder 1; St. Joseph's Registry Book 1,
Cleveland Catholic Diocesan Archives, et
passim.
12 OHIO HISTORY
Orphan Asylum attended classes in nearby
public schools. Job training
was acquired in the orphanage either by
attending classes or, probably
most often, by maintaining the buildings
and grounds of the orphanage
itself. And the intention was to teach
more than skills, as the 1869
Jewish Orphan Asylum report noted:
"Love of industry, aversion to
idleness, are implanted into their young
hearts, being practically taught
by giving the larger inmates some light
work to perform before or after
school; the girls to assist in every
branch of the household, and the
boys to keep the premises in order, and
to cultivate our vegetable
garden."19
Parents, too, saw orphanages as
solutions to poverty-their own-
and often committed their children
themselves, sometimes placing
them up for adoption but far more often
relinquishing control only
temporarily until the family could get
back on its feet. Orphanage
registers often contain entries such as
this from St. Mary's (1854) about
an eight-year-old girl: "both
[parents] living but could not keep the
child on account of their difficult
position." The child returned to her
parents after a brief stay.20
Orphanages sometimes asked parents or
other family members to
pay a portion of the child's board, but
it is not clear that they did. The
institutions thus became refuges where
poor children could be fed,
sheltered, clothed, and educated at
little or no expense to their parents.
Orphanages tried to be homes, not
institutions, but life in these large
congregate facilities did not encourage
individuality or spontaneity. In
1900 the Jewish Orphan Asylum, the
largest of the institutions,
sheltered about 500 children; St.
Vincent's about 300, and the Protes-
tant Orphan Asylum close to 100. The
Jewish Orphan Asylum super-
visor boasted that his orphanage did not
turn out "machine children,"
but obviously regimentation was
imperative.21 The orphanages encour-
aged organized games and sports on
adjoining playgrounds, and the
children wore uniform clothing in
keeping with the theory that they
needed discipline. Moreover, all the
institutions operated on slender
budgets which did not allow for
luxuries. Nor would self-indulgence or
19. Bellefaire, MS 3665, Jewish Orphan
Asylum, Annual Report, 1869, 15, Contain-
er 15.
20. St. Mary's Registry Book [labeled
St. Joseph's] n.p., Cleveland Catholic Dioce-
san Archives. Katz describes this use of
orphanages in Poverty and Policy in American
History, 18-56, and In the Shadow, 113-45.
21. Bellefaire, MS 3665, Jewish Orphan
Asylum, Annual Report, 1889, 44, Container
16; Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, Annual
Report, 1894 (Cleveland, 1894), 5;
"St. Vincent's Orphan Asylum,
1881-1900," in folder, "St. Vincent's Orphanage", n.p.,
Mt. St. Augustine Archives, Richfield,
Ohio. These were standard sizes for orphanages
nationally, according to Marks,
"Institutions for Dependent," 37.
Homes for Poverty's Children 13 |
|
self-expression have been considered appropriate, given the orphan- ages' mission and clientele. It is difficult to know how the children themselves felt. Both the Jewish Orphan Asylum and the Protestant Orphan Asylum published glowing accounts from their "graduates," but these should be read with caution. Deeds speak louder than words in an annual report. A few adventurous children-more boys than girls-"ran away in the night when everyone was asleep," perhaps in desperate, homesick search for parents or siblings. One mother removed her children from St. Mary's and placed them with friends, for "the children were very lonely, and she feared they would worry too much."22 Every orphan- age annual report recorded at least one death, for childhood diseases like measles and whooping cough could be fatal.
22. According to Jay Mechling, "Oral Evidence and the History of American Children's Lives," Journal of American History, 74 (September, 1987), 579, "Children remain the last underclass to have their history written from their point of view." Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum annual reports during the 1870s carry letters from |
14 OHIO HISTORY
The vast majority of children, however,
did stay until they were
discharged by the institution. The stays
lasted sometimes only a few
days or weeks but most often months and
years. The Protestant
Orphan Asylum from the first advocated
only temporary institutional-
ization, but "temporary" might
mean at least a year until a foster home
could be found or the child could be
returned to family or friends. St.
Mary's and St. Joseph's routinely kept
children four to five years, but
St. Vincent's for much briefer periods,
perhaps because there was less
room or more demand for service. The
Jewish Orphan Asylum kept the
children sometimes as long as eight or
nine years, possibly because it
was more difficult to keep in touch with
their out-of-town families.23
Yet if bleak and regimented, life in
these institutions may have seemed
better to these children or to their
parents than the nineteenth-century
alternatives: the Infirmary or a life of
destitution.
By the early years of the
twentieth-century, Cleveland had under-
gone dramatic and decisive changes.
Reflecting the national trend, the
city's economy had completed the shift
to heavy industry, particularly
the manufacture of finished iron and
steel products. Burgeoning
prosperity allowed Cleveland's
established families to continue a
migration out of the central city, which
by the 1920s would reach the
neighboring suburbs, and to generously
endow the city's lasting
monuments to culture, the Cleveland
Museum of Art and the Cleveland
Orchestra.
This wealth was not evenly distributed.
Responding to the impera-
tives of greater industrialization, the
work force was less skilled and
even more vulnerable to unemployment and
economic crisis. The
multiplication of the population by more
than twenty-fold from 1850 to
1900 indicated a high degree of
transience. Furthermore, in 1910 almost
75 percent of Clevelanders were either
foreign-born or the children of
foreign-born parents. These people,
drawn increasingly from south-
eastern Europe and clustered in
congested and unwholesome ghettos,
faced greater cultural obstacles to
economic success or assimilation
than had earlier immigrants.24
former inmates and the families with
whom they had been placed, and the Jewish Orphan
Asylum published the Jewish Orphan
Asylum Magazine, 1903 ff, in Bellefaire, MS 3665,
Containers 16 and 17. The specific
reference is to St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum,
1883-1894, n.p., Cleveland Catholic
Diocesan Archives.
23. This can be calculated by comparing
the number admitted with the number
released in the Cleveland Protestant
Orphan Asylum annual reports. The registers of the
Catholic institutions noted the length
of stay, as did the Jewish Orphan Asylum annual
reports.
24. Cleveland Federation for Charity and
Philanthropy, The Social Year Book: The
Human Problems and Resources of
Cleveland (Cleveland, 1913), 8.
Homes for Poverty's Children 15
Changes in both the private and the
public relief efforts acknowl-
edged the growing scope and complexity
of this urban poverty. Private
relief efforts continued to be crucial,
as suggested by the establishment
in 1913 of a federated charity
organization, the Federation for Charity
and Philanthropy, to coordinate the
activities of the proliferating
voluntary agencies and institutions.
Many of these shared the redis-
covered belief that dependence was best
cured by the efficient distri-
bution of outdoor relief, not by
institutionalization. An example of this
changed strategy was Associated
Charities, offspring of the Bethel
Union, whose goal was no longer to
provide shelter for the dependent,
but "to provide outdoor relief ...
and to rehabilitate needy families."25
Public relief activities also reflected
this trend. The city relied
increasingly upon outdoor relief. The
former Infirmary by 1910 housed
only the old and chronically ill.
Policies regarding the care for
dependent children changed as well.
The 1909 White House Conference on
Dependent Children signaled an
increased willingness on the part of
public officials to assume respon-
sibility for child welfare and stressed
that "home life" was far better
for children than institutional life.
These new directions were embodied
in a 1913 Ohio mothers' pension law
which provided widows or
deserted mothers with a stipend so that
they could care for their
children in their own homes rather than
place them in an orphanage.26
The orphanages were compelled to adapt
to these trends although
they did so only gradually. They began
by trying to redefine their
clientele. For if children belonged in their
own homes and their poverty
was a public responsibility, who
belonged in a private institution?
Anticipating the future psychiatric
orientation of the orphanages, the
Protestant Orphan Asylum by the end of
the 1920s developed this
answer: that their clientele would be
"problem cases" and "unsocial"
children who would not fit into a
private home until a stay in the
orphanage had helped them to unravel
their "mental snarls." The other
orphanages' records also began to note
children's behavior problems.27
In the 1920s the orphanages moved out of
the central city into the
suburbs and replaced their congregate
housing with cottages more
25. Ibid., 39.
26. Bremner, Children and Youth, Vol.
11, (Cambridge, Mass., 1972) vii-viii, and
"Other People's Children,"
88-89.
27. Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, Annual
Report, 1926 1929 (Cleveland,
1929), 47; St. Joseph's Register,
1929-1942 et passim. Michael Sharlitt, Superintendent of
Bellefaire, made a distinction between
its earlier inmates who were "biological" or
"sociological orphans" and its
current inmates who were "psychological orphans" in
Bellefaire, MS 3665, Bellefaire Annual
Reports, 1933-34, n.p., Container 16, Folder 1.
16 OHIO HISTORY |
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suggestive of "home life" and more conducive to individual psycho- logical treatment. The facilities sheltered fewer children and were able to allow a more flexible regimen within their walls and more opportu- nities for recreation outside. Not coincidentally, the orphanages even- tually assumed new names, suggestive of their rural and noninstitutional settings: the Catholic institutions merged to become Parmadale, the Jewish Orphan Asylum became Bellefaire, and the Protestant Orphan Asylum was rechristened Beech Brook. Orphanages also modified some of their discharge practices. As early as 1912, for example, the Protestant Orphan Asylum noted an increase in the number of children given "temporary care" and returned to their parents after a family "emergency" had been solved, maintaining that this was the asylum's way to help "re-establish a home." All orphan- ages reported few adoptions, and when the return of the child to its own home seemed impossible, it was placed in a foster home. The Catholic orphanages and the Jewish Orphan Asylum, however, were slow to relinquish children to foster homes, probably because of the |
Homes for Poverty's Children 17
difficulty in finding an appropriate
Catholic or Jewish foster family. In
1929 the average stay at the Jewish
Orphan Asylum was still 4.2
years.28
All orphanages retained their religious
impetus and character, for
they had vital spiritual and financial
ties to their particular denomina-
tions. The Protestant Orphan Asylum's
1917 annual report, for exam-
ple, described the orphanage as "a
temporary home for dependent
children, a stopping place on their way
from homes of wretchedness
and sin to those of Christian
influence." The Jewish Orphan Asylum
emphasized the "teaching of the
history and the religion of our people
with the end in view that our children
be thoroughly imbued with the
spirit of Jewishness, which for years to
come may be their guide
through life."29
All continued to teach the children both
the habit and the virtue of
labor. Even after its move to the
country the Protestant Orphan
Asylum provided the children with
"various ways of earning money.
[The children's] regular household
duties they do, of course, without
compensation, but there are extra jobs
for which they are paid, such as
washing windows, shoveling snow,
carrying coal for the kitchen
range." The wages were to be
secured in the orphanage savings
bank.30
The slowness to change practices is
partially explained by the fact
that the orphanages still housed poor
children. Their poverty is
apparent in the records of the separate
orphanages but even more
noticeable in large-scale studies
conducted by the Cleveland Welfare
Federation and the Cleveland Children's
Bureau. The immediate
impetus for the Bureau's establishment
was a survey which showed
that orphans, as in the
nineteenth-century, had parents who were using
the orphanages as temporary shelters for
their children: 91 percent of
the children in Cleveland orphanages
during 1915-1919 had at least one
surviving parent and 66 percent returned
to parents or relatives. The
Protestant Orphan Asylum claimed in 1913
alone to have been beseiged
by 252 requests from parents to take
care of their children.31
28. Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, Annual
Report, 1912 (Cleveland, 1912),
16-17; Bellefaire, MS 3665, "A
study of Intake Policies at Bellefaire," 2, Container 19,
Folder 1.
29. Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, AnnualReport,
1917 (Cleveland, 1917), 10;
Bellefaire, MS 3665, Jewish Orphan
Asylum, Annual Report, 1907, 41, Container 15.
30. Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, Annual
Report, 1926-29 (Cleveland,
1929), 47.
31. Children's Services, MS 4020,
Western Reserve Historical Society, U.S.
Children's Bureau, "The Children's
Bureau of Cleveland and Its Relation to Other
Child-Welfare Agencies,"
(Washington D.C., 1927), 19, Container 6; Cleveland Protes-
18 OHIO HISTORY
Because this practice ran counter to the
prevailing belief that
children were best raised within
families, the Bureau was supposed to
screen the requests for placement by
agencies and particularly by
parents, such as this one: "A
so-called widow with three children was
referred for study from an institution.
It was planned the children
would be kept temporarily during the
summer, to return to the woman
in the fall, giving her an opportunity
to catch up financially." Investi-
gation by the Bureau revealed, however,
that she had remarried and
that she and her second husband were
suspected of "neglect and
immorality;" after a mental test,
she was sentenced to the Marysville
Reformatory.32
As in previous years, the parents of
orphans were often new
immigrants to the United States.
Orphanage registers noted the greater
numbers of southeastern European
immigrants. The Protestant Orphan
Asylum claimed in 1919 that of its 111
new client families, only 44 were
"American." The records
of St. Vincent's and the Jewish Orphan
Asylum noted children of Italian,
Polish, Lithuanian, Hungarian,
Russian and Roumanian backgrounds. To
St. Joseph's, for example,
came a Russian widow, who "being
obliged to work out," wanted the
asylum to keep her child; so recently
had she arrived that she "needed
an interpreter" to make her
request.33 Despite the growing number of
black migrants from the South, however, no
private child-care institu-
tion in the city took black children
during this period.34
Disease still killed and disabled
parents. The nineteenth-century
cholera epidemics had a
twentieth-century counterpart in the great flu
epidemic of 1918. A Children's Bureau
study of institutionalized
children in 1922-25 listed illness or
physical disability as the condition
which most contributed to children's
dependency.35
tant Orphan Asylum, Annual Report,
1913 (Cleveland, 1913), 14.
32. Children's Services, MS 4020, First
Annual Report of the Children's Bureau,
1922, 1-2, Container 4, Folder 50.
33. Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, Annual
Report, 1919 (Cleveland, 1919), 10;
St. Joseph's Register, 1884-1904, n.p.,
Cleveland Catholic Diocesan Archives.
34. U.S. Government Publishing Office, Children
Under Institutional Care, 1923
(Washington, D.C., 1927), 106-09,
indicates that Cleveland institutions took only white
children. This is substantiated by
Children's Services, MS 4020, Minutes, Cleveland
Humane Society, April 10, 1931,
Container 3, Folder 41. A memo from the Protestant
and nonsectarian child-care agencies to
the Children's Council of the Welfare Federa-
tion, May 29, 1945, 6, Federation for
Community Planning, MS 3788, Western Reserve
Historical Society, Container 48, Folder
1166, indicates that this was still the practice at
that date although the Catholic
institutions had "no policy of exclusion because of
color."
35. Children's Services, MS 4020, U.S.
Children's Bureau, "The Children's Bureau
of Cleveland," 11.
Homes for Poverty's Children 19
"Mental disability,"
interestingly, ranked fourth in this list, and
orphanage records also stated that
mental illness frequently incapaci-
tated parents. The 1923 Jewish Orphan
Asylum report, for example,
described a "Mother in state
institution" and a "Mother incompetent,
supposed to be suffering from
melancholia."36 Perhaps culture shock
drove these new immigrants mad.
More likely, however, these parents were
victims of the current
vogue for IQ and personality testing and
for institutionalizing those
diagnosed as mentally incompetent or
"feeble-minded." The practical
implications of this analysis and
treatment for both children and
parents are illustrated in this case
study from the Children's Bureau:
"M[an] died Feb. 1921, W[oman]
works in rooming-house on 30th and
Superior and is feeble-minded. Sarah, 7,
and William, 5, are both in
Cleveland Protestant Orphanage. Sarah is
peculiar ... William is sub-
normal, cannot stay with other
children."37
These diagnoses were simply a more
"modern" way of describing
the delinquency and neglect earlier
associated with poverty. By the
early twentieth-century this association
had been reinforced by the
cultural and religious differences
between the southeastern European
immigrants and orphanage administrators
and staff.
Some parents did abuse and neglect their
children. For example, the
Children's Bureau and the Humane Society
struggled together to solve
cases like this: "W[ife] ran away,
M[an] wanted children placed. Case
was in court; W was accused by M of
drinking. M and W tried living
together again, just had a shack and no
stove and W refused to stay
there. M was brought in later for
contributing to delinquency of a
niece." Or, from the Jewish Orphan
Asylum 1915 report, "Father
deserted wife and four children October
22. Mother found very untidy,
backward, and incompetent ... Plan to
send children to the Orphan
Home at that time was met with
resistance."38
Poverty, on the other hand, received
little emphasis in the Children's
Bureau study: "inadequate
income" ranked as only the fifth largest
contributor to child dependence.39 This
does not mean that institution-
36. Ibid.; Bellefaire, MS 3665,
Jewish Orphan Asylum, Annual Report, 1923, 66-67,
Container 16.
37. Children's Services, MS 4020,
Minutes of the committee of the Children's Bureau
and the Humane Society, undated but
mid-1920s, Container 4, Folder 50. See also Katz,
In the Shadow, 182-86, on eugenics and feeblemindedness as means of
diagnosing and
treating dependence.
38. Children's Services, MS 4020,
Minutes of the committee of the Children's Bureau
and the Humane Society, undated but
mid-1920s, Container 4, Folder 50: Bellefaire, MS
3665, Jewish Orphan Asylum, Annual
Report, 1925, 67, Container 15.
39. Children's Services, MS 4020, U.S.
Children's Bureau, "The Children's Bureau
20 OHIO HISTORY
alized children were no longer poor, but
that child-care workers were
reluctant to recognize the existence or
disruptive impact of poverty.
The mothers' pension law of 1913 was
supposed to have eliminated the
institutionalization of dependent
children, although federal census
figures show that in 1923 more dependent
children were cared for in
institutions than by mothers' pensions.
Reaffirming what had never-
theless become the accepted position,
the executive secretary of the
Humane Society in 1927 claimed that
"Poverty in itself does not now
constitute cause for removal of children
from their parents."40
Even during the much-vaunted prosperity
of the 1920s, however,
there were plenty of impoverished
Americans, especially in a heavy-
industry town such as Cleveland. For
example, although the Children's
Bureau survey maintained that
"unemployment due to industrial
depression did not appear as an acute
problem in the dependency of
these children," it did concede:
"Possibly the long period of unem-
ployment, which began in 1920 and lasted
into 1922 in Cleveland,
started in these families the
disintegrating forces reflected in ill health,
desertion, and the need of the mother to
go to work." Possibly indeed.
Poverty was in fact implicit in the many
referrals to the orphanages
from Associated Charities and other
relief agencies, in the dispropor-
tionate numbers of "new
immigrant" parents noted, and in the
preponderance of mothers' requests for
placement for their children
since a widowed, deserted, or unwed
mother had as few financial
resources in the twentieth-century as
she had in the nineteenth.41
By 1929 when the Depression officially
began, the poverty of the
city's orphans could no longer be
disguised or confused with family
disintegration or delinquency. Parents'
contributions to their children's
board in the orphanages dropped
dramatically.42 The city's private
child-care agencies quickly ran out of
funds as endowment incomes
failed and the community chest made
dramatic budget cuts. In re-
sponse a public agency, the Cuyahoga
County Child Welfare Board,
was set up, which assumed financial
responsibility for 800 state and
county wards from the Humane Society and
the Welfare Association
for Jewish Children. These constituted,
however, less than 20 percent
of Cleveland," 52.
40. U.S. Government Publishing Office, Children
Under Care, 14; Children's Ser-
vices, MS 4020, "Annual Bulletin of
the Cleveland Humane Society," May 1926, 6,
Container 3, Folder 36.
41. Children's Services, MS 4020, U.S.
Children's Bureau, "The Children's Bureau
of Cleveland," 53, 54-59.
42. Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, Annual
Report, 1926-29 (Cleveland, 1929),
58.
Homes for Poverty's Children 21 |
|
of dependent children; the rest were cared for by private agencies in the county.43 These financial exigencies prompted a survey by the Welfare Fed- eration, which showed that the numbers of children admitted to the orphanages had gradually declined during the 1920s. However, by the end of the decade fewer children could be discharged because the depression made it impossible to return them to their own poverty- stricken families or to place them with foster families who might be equally hard up. The orphanages were too crowded to accommodate the children of all the needy parents who wished placement.44 In 1933 the Children's Bureau starkly revealed the poverty of the parents of Cleveland's "orphans." Of the 513 families which had 800 children in child-care facilities, only 131 had employed members; 10 of these worked part-time; 8 for board and room only, and 300 families
43. Lucia Johnson Bing, Social Work in Greater Cleveland (Cleveland, 1938), 56; Emma 0. Lundberg, Child Dependency in the United States (New York, n.d.), 137. 44. Federation for Community Planning, MS 788 "Cleveland's Dependent Children," June 1931, Container 32, Folder 185. |
22 OHIO HISTORY
were "entirely out of work."
Yet only 97 were on relief. Few earned
as much as $20 a week; many more earned
less than $5. Almost none
could contribute to their children's
board in an institution.45
It is possible to argue that the poverty
of these children was only the
result of the Depression, that their
poverty was exceptional rather than
typical, but the evidence from earlier
years strongly suggests other-
wise. And in fact still another study
done in 1942, after the worst of the
Depression was over, showed that
"dependency" still described the
plight of 91 percent of the children in
orphanages; almost 60 percent of
parents made some payment for board but
33 percent were able to
make none; more than half were employed,
but seven percent were still
on public assistance, and almost 16
percent reported no source of
income whatsoever.46
Nevertheless, 1933 is a good place to
end this story of orphans and
orphanages, for it marks the beginnings
of the New Deal and the
assumption of major responsibilities for
social welfare by the federal
government. In 1935 the Social Security
Act established old age and
unemployment insurance programs and Aid
to Dependent Children.
Although these would not mean an end to
the poverty of children, these
programs would mean an end to orphanages
as their homes.
45. Ibid, "Analysis of
Financial Status," April 1933. Container 4, Folder 56.
46. Children's Services, MS 4020.
Children's Bureau, "Analysis of 602 Children in
Institutions . . . January 1,
1942," Container 4, Folder 60.
MARIAN J. MORTON
Homes for Poverty's Children:
Cleveland's Orphanages, 1851-1933
Orphanages were first and foremost
responses to the poverty of
children. Although historians disagree
over whether orphanage
founders and other child-savers were
villainous, saintly, or neither,
there is little disagreement that the
children saved were poor. When
this becomes the focus of the story,
orphans appear less as victims of
middle-class attempts to control or
uplift them than as victims of
poverty; orphanages emerge less as
punitive or ameliorative institu-
tions than as poorhouses for children,
and a history of Cleveland's
orphans and orphanages is less about the
struggle to restore social
order or evangelize the masses than
about the persistence of poverty in
urban America.1
Today Cleveland's three major child-care
facilities are residential
treatment centers which provide
psychiatric services for children with
emotional or behavioral problems. These
same facilities, from their late
nineteenth-century beginnings to the
Great Depression, however, were
Marian J. Morton is Professor of History
at John Carroll University.
1. Historians critical of child-savers
include the following: David J. Rothman, The
Discovery of Asylum: Order and
Disorder in the Early Republic (Boston,
1980); Steven
L. Schossman, Love and tile American
Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of
"Progressive" Juvenile
Justice, 1825-1920 (Chicago, 1977);
Anthony M. Platt, The Child
Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago, 1977); Ellen Ryerson, The Best-Laid
Plans: America's Juvenile Court
Experiment (New York, 1978), and
Michael B. Katz,
Poverty and Policy in American
History (New York, London, 1983) and In
the Shadow
of the Poorhouse: A Social History of
Welfare in America (New York, 1986).
More
positive evaluations include Susan
Tiffin, In Whose Best Interest: Child Welfare Reform
in the Progressive Era (Westport, Conn., 1982); Robert H. Bremner, "Other
People's
Children," Journal of Social
History, 16 (Spring, 1983), 83-104; Michael W. Sherraden
and Susan Whitelaw Downs, "The
Orphan Asylum in the Nineteenth Century," Social
Service Review, 57 (June, 1983), 272-90, and Peter L. Tyor and Jamil S.
Zainaldin,
"Asylum and Society: An Approach to
Institutional Change, Journal of Social History,
13 (Fall, 1979), 23-48. A sensitive and
balanced portrait of child-savers and child-saving
institutions is provided by LeRoy Ashby,
Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent
Children, 1890-1917 (Philadelphia, 1984). An excellent review of the
literature on
child-saving is Clarke A. Chambers,
"Toward a Redefinition of Welfare History,"
Journal of American History, 73 (September, 1986), 416-18.