Ohio History Journal

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.