"Saving Our Kids: Protection in America" Michael Grossberg, Indiana University [Draft – not for attribution without consent of the author]

Chapter 1. Mary Ellen and the Creation of Child Protection

Mary Ellen’s childhood was a from which she could never wake up. Born in 1864 the illegitimate daughter of Thomas McCormack and Mary

Wilson, tragedy befell her quickly. Her mother abandoned Mary Ellen to a caretaker who could not support her and turned her over to poor relief officials. The officials then placed the eighteen-month-old with

McCormack and his wife, also named Mary, whose three children had all perished quite young. When Thomas died shortly afterwards, his widow married Francis

Connolly and Mary Ellen began living in a New York City tenement with the newlyweds. Local officials lost track of the child until April 1874, when rumors of mistreatment began circulating among the Connolly's neighbors. Charity worker

Etta Wheeler caught a glimpse of the nine-year old dressed in rags, malnourished, and covered with bruises. Wheeler convinced the head of the recently formed Society for the Prevention of to investigate.

SPCA President documented the charges of child cruelty, and the organization's counsel Elbridge T. Gerry had a writ issued to bring the girl before a local magistrate claiming that she was being held unlawfully.1

In a crowded courtroom, a weeping Mary Ellen testified to a life of constant beatings and starvation. She had never been allowed to go to school or play with other children and had been kept locked in a room during the day and 2 allowed outside only at night. The New York Times reported to shocked readers that the child did not even know how old she was. Mary Ellen told Judge

Abraham R. Lawrence: "Mamma (Mrs. Connolly) has been in the habit of whipping me with a twisted whip – a raw hide. The whip always left a black and blue mark on my body. I have now the black and blue marks on my head which were made by mamma, and also a cut on the left side of my forehead which was made by a pair of scissors. (Scissors produced in court.) She struck me with the scissors and cut me; I have no recollection of ever having been kissed by any one – have never been kissed by mamma. I have never been taken on my mamma's lap and caressed or petted. I have never dared speak to anyone, because if I did I would get whipped." She added, plaintively, "I do not know for what I was whipped – mamma never said anything to me when she whipped me." The Times, which described Mary Ellen as "a bright little girl, with features indicating unusual mental capacity, but with a care-worn, stunted, and prematurely old look," said that she pleaded: "I do not want to go back to live with mamma, because she beats me so." Gerry warned the judge that returning the girl to the Connollys "would probably result in her being beaten to death."2

The Connollys had refused to attend the hearing. After listening to Mary

Ellen's story, Judge Lawrence recessed the proceedings and issued a subpoena requiring their presence the next day. Mary Connolly took the stand at the reconvened hearing and complained that her late husband had forced her to care for his illegitimate child. After he died, she continued to raise the girl without 3 any assistance and claimed to have done so as well as she could, though the stepmother admitted that she had not made all of the required yearly reports on the child's condition. Upon the completion of testimony, Judge Lawrence bound

Mrs. Connolly over for trial on charges of felonious assault.

The trial took place on April 21. Mary Ellen repeated her tale of brutalization at the hands of her "mamma." Neighbors from the tenement supported her claims of mistreatment. Mrs. Connolly offered no defense, and after deliberating for twenty minutes the jury found her guilty not of felonious assault but the lesser crime of assault and battery. According to the Times, the judge lectured the prisoner that "he had no doubt whatsoever of her guilt. She had been accorded every opportunity to prove her innocence, and the court was fully satisfied that she had been guilty of gross and wanton cruelty." He then sentenced her to the most severe penalty possible: a year in the state penitentiary at hard labor. Judge Lawrence ended the proceedings by ordering

Mary Ellen into the care of "The Sheltering Arms" orphanage.3

Mary Ellen's tragic tale burst like a thunderstorm over the city and then the nation as news of the story spread quickly. But, however lamentable, physical cruelty toward children was hardly a new problem. Nor were most of the other threats to the physical and moral well-being of children that suddenly loomed large such as factory labor and immoral literature. Nevertheless stories like the horrifying tale of the mistreated girl and her cruel step-mother seemed to uncover new problems that not only threatened the young but the whole nation. 4

All of the sudden the fate of endangered children became a critical concern of

American society. Something had to be done. A close examination of the creation of campaigns against child cruelty explains why and how policies of protection became the primary way to save children like Mary Ellen and began a movement that would dominate American children’s policies into the twenty-first century.

Fears for Families and Children

Decades before it became a common slogan, a barrage of newspaper and magazine stories made Mary Ellen America’s first poster child. In 1876 Henry P.

Keens composed a song that expressed the battered girl’s status as an icon of youthful suffering. It began:

See within that dismal chamber

Clothed in rags and chilled with fear

No kind father to protect her

With no watchful mother near

Weeps an infant, pale and feeble,

Victim of her keeper's rage,

Tender flower crushed and broken,

Blighted in her budding age.

The chorus then demanded action:

Who will help this little orphan, 5

Left on earth without a friend?

Who will shelter and protect her?

Who will peace and mercy send?4

The lyrics suggest why Mary Ellen's story became a galvanizing event.It spoke directly to some of the most fundamental hopes and fears of the American public for its children.

Sensational and disturbing stories like the ones told about Mary Ellen captured the attention of readers and in doing so helped create an empathic public receptive to campaigns to save the suffering victims in the and in Western Europe. As a French official acknowledged in 1897, "Would you not grant that the considerable development of laws and institutions protecting children is also due in large measure to the press, its daily remarks, the facts it has brought together that inform us, that move us to pity, forcing us to think, to act, to seek out remedies?"5 The power of these stories testified to the growing influence of the media as well as to the authority of individual experiences to shape the popular perception of social problems.6

The Times, for instance, stoked its readers’ fears in the way it described

Mary Connolly’s response to her conviction: "The prisoner heard her sentence without moving a muscle, and preserved the same hard, cruel expression of countenance displayed by her during the trial, while being conveyed to the

Tombs." And then the reporter added for good measure: “The wanton and unremitting cruelty of the woman Connolly, who had the courage to come on the 6 stand and brazenly defend her inhumanity, forms an awful revelation of the barbarism that lurks amid our Christian civilization.”7 Such words shamed and stigmatized those like Connolly accused of endangering children. They relied on what legal scholar Mona Lynch has called “the discourse of disgust.” She argues that policymaking is not motivated simply by rational drives to police particularly threatening offenders, but “rather it is steeped in a constellation of emotional expressions of disgust, fear of contagion, and pollution avoidance, manifested in a legislative concern about boundary vulnerabilities between the social spheres of the pure and the dangerous.”8 Disgust toward the individual child abusers like

Mary Connolly made them not simply failed parents but rather a contagion threatening the moral well-being of the nation.

Keens’ lyrics and stories like those in the Times gave men and women a way to use the harrowing plight of Mary Ellen to express broader fears about

American families. Massive structural transformations in the economy and society tied to the rippling effects of industrial capitalism, urbanization, and immigration were having a profound impact on homes throughout North America and Western Europe. Alongside the rising material well-being of many, was the dislocation and confusion that placed others in dire straits. The family seemed to be a major casualty of the swiftly changing times. Evidence of family failure seemed to be visible everywhere: rising divorce rates, low marriage rates among educated women, falling birth rates among the middle and upper classes coupled with rising birth rates among working class and immigrant families, increased 7 resort to abortion, growing poverty, rising , parentless children roaming the streets of American cities, and on and on. Particularly troubling to many old stock Americans was the family produced by waves of immigrants. As millions of people from southern and eastern European streamed into the nation and especially its cities during the late nineteenth century, difference seemed to dominate the way families handled everything from age of marriage to child labor. In 1903 social reformer Vida D. Scudder decried what she saw as a “cleavage of classes, cleavage of races, cleavage of faiths, an inextricable confusion.”9

Much of the white protestant majority reacted with fear and apprehension to this seemingly endless diversity. As Theodore Roosevelt thundered to a conference of churches, "Questions like the tariff and the currency are of literally no consequence whatsoever compared with the vital question of having the unit of our social life, the home, preserved."10 Fears for families were reinforced by the era's social Darwinian tendency to sort human beings into more and more distinct and hierarchal racial, ethnic, and social groups. Class lines hardened while racial, ethnic and gender differences were being etched deeper and deeper into American consciousness. Working class and immigrant families and neighborhoods were increasingly feared as breeding grounds of crime, disease, poverty, and sexual immorality.11 In the mid-1870s, Mary Connolly gave this menace a human form, which was why the stories about Mary Ellen attracted and repelled so many readers. 8

Apprehension about victimized children like Mary Ellen also intensified because fundamental changes in childhood occurred in the midst of this late nineteenth century family crisis. A new understanding of children as separate and distinct individuals with their own needs and interests came to dominate

American and Western European conceptions of childhood first among the middle classes and then other social groups. More than ever before, childhood became viewed as a special time for study, growth, and play. As we shall see, the consequences of modern conceptions of childhood were multiple and long lasting. Initially, the critical point to make is that age itself became much more important as a marker of individual status and a determinate of what an individual could and could not do.12 The new age consciousness made the distinction between being a child and an more consequential as age assumed a role in self-identity and social understanding that rivaled distinctions of race, class, and gender.13 The new importance of age made Mary Ellen’s inability to say how old she a particularly damning piece of evidence in Connolly’s trial.

The hardening of age distinctions in late nineteenth century America is also significant because it alerts us to the centrality of adult perceptions of the young in the response to Mary Ellen’s story. The point is critical because it highlights the difference between children as distinctive historical actors and childhood as a shifting set of ideas. Recognizing the fundamental difference between growing up as experienced by children and childhood as perceived by 9 compels us to acknowledge that the lives children lead reflect not simply their human biology but also the cultural assumptions of the time and place in which they live.14 As the panicked reaction to Mary Ellen’s brutalization demonstrates, specific understandings of childhood dominate American society at particular times. These cultural constructions have very real consequences for children's lives because they become critical components in attitudes and policies toward the young.

Mary Connolly’s failure to give her step-daughter a ‘childhood’ ranked very high on the popular bill of indictment against her. Connolly ran afoul of a rising emphasis on parental obligations propelled by the new ideas of childhood and the public’s fears about family failure. Doubts multiplied about received the belief in parenthood as a natural category and that the seemingly innate love of a parent for his or her offspring would make them a fit mother or father.15

Legal scholar Ernst Freund voiced this new understanding of parenthood in 1904 when he asserted that parental authority was "a power in trust … The authority to control the child is not the natural right of the parent; it emanates from the

State."16 Similarly, New York City charity leader Edward T. Devine insisted, "It is the new view of the child that the child is worthy of the parent's sacrifice."17

Such declarations expressed an emerging conclusion that good parents must be subjected to external standards set by the state and experts, which undermined faith in household privacy and the exclusive right of parents to oversee the upbringing of their children. And they ensured that disputes over the proper 10 balance between the collective responsibility of the public for child rearing and the rights of particular mothers and fathers to raise their offspring as they saw fit would be endemic in this era of family crisis. Reactions to Mary Connolly showed how explosive they could become.18

The new understandings of the place of children in American society and the new fears for them also turned working class and immigrant children like

Mary Ellen into symbols of modernity's promise and perils. Abused youngsters, newspaper boys, flower girls, malnourished babies, teenage prostitutes, child factory workers, and a host of other young Americans became the focus of apprehension among those who read the stories about Mary Ellen because children without a childhood came to be considered threatened and threatening.

In his 1872 autobiography, Charles Loring Brace, founder of the New York

Children's Aid Society, used the intentionally frightening phrase "the dangerous classes" to describe the "outcastes, vicious, reckless multitude of New York boys, swarming … in every foul alley and low street." If these boys and other children like them were neglected by society as they had been by their parents, Brace foresaw the possibility of "an explosion from this class which might leave the city in ashes and blood."19 Such ominous predictions encouraged the belief that new standards of parental conduct must be devised and imposed to ensure that children were segregated into their proper domains of home, school, and playground. The declining confidence in the abilities of families to rear their 11 children properly, in turn, encouraged the conclusion that proper childhood must be imposed if it was not provided by the parents.20

Fears for the family, new conceptions of childhood, and growing doubts about parents made the stories about Mary Ellen so inflammatory. They also ensured that the stories had clear moral: brutalized children must be saved and their abusers punished. Equally clear was the corollary: cruel parents like Mary

Connolly forfeited their rights by brutalizing their children. Such families were not worth protecting, only their children.

The Turn to Protection

However heart-wrenching, stories alone could not save children. An aroused public needed a rationale for piecing the veil of family privacy and helping Mary Ellen and other endangered children. The search for a new family order led to child protection in the United States as it did in other European nations.

The appeal of protection had been evident in the chorus of Keen's song when he asked plaintively: “Who will shelter and protect her?” New York law reformer David Dudley Field replied in an 1886 essay on "The Child and the

State." He began with a story of his own about the horrors of family life in

American slums: “In one of the tenement houses of the city, and their number is legion, there is a room nineteen feet long, fifteen feet broad, and eleven high, where live a man and his wife and eight children. They sleep, dress, wash, cook 12 and eat in this one room. These ten persons have together thirty-one hundred cubic feet of air, while the law requires at least six thousand feet – nearly twice as much as they get. From tenement houses like this one flows out a daily stream of children, ragged and dirty, to pick up rags, cigar stumps, and other refuse of the streets, or to pilfer or beg, as best they can.” Leaving tenement reform to housing crusaders, he pleaded: “I ask attention only to the condition of the children, and for illustration take the case of a boy, five years old, who is found, in a chill November day, barefooted, scantily clothed, searching among the rag heaps in the street. He is a well-formed child, his face is fair, and as he turns his bright eyes hit upon you when you ask him where he lives, you see he is such a child as a father should look upon with pride and a true mother would press to her bosom.” Then Field asked his own question:“Yet the parents are miserably poor, the father is half the time out of work, and the mother wan with the care of her family. This is not all. Father and mother both drink to excess, and each is intoxicated as often at least as Saturday night comes round… Has the state any duties toward this little boy, and if so what are they?”21

After pledging his opposition “to the paternal theory of government” and genuflecting to the canons of American traditionalism by praising the sanctity of the family, Field gave his answer: "when parental love fails, and the offspring is either abandoned or educated in vice, the state may rightfully intervene. Its right is derived from its duty to protect itself and to protect all of its people." He made that point as emphatically as he could: "Protection, however, is the 13 foundation of the right I am asserting. We must of course have a care that interference for protection be not carried beyond its rightful limits. If any general rule could be laid down for marking these limits it would perhaps be this, that the state should not invade one man's rights in order to protect another's.

What the individual can do for himself the state should not undertake. But in the case supposed, the faithless parent has forfeited his right to his child, and the only point to be considered is the relation of the child to the state."22

As Field’s careful presentation suggests, the search for a way to save endangered children like Mary Ellen gave new meaning to an old word. And it did so throughout the European world. As historian Sylvia Schafer discovered, the 1877 Dictionnaire de la langue française codified the trans-European meaning of protection: "In negative terms protection signified an act of guarding against danger, or protecting against imminent harm. At the same time, protection also signified an act of cultivation or assistance."23 The new definition made children the direct object of policy and protection the primary goal of children’s policy.

As the definition suggests, child protection was a part of trans-Atlantic humanitarian movements of the late nineteenth-century. Saving children became a critical flank, indeed a defining crusade, of this new humanitarian drive. Conversely, the reform drive gave meaning and sustenance to efforts to aid children. These interconnections made children powerful symbols of the dire consequences of uncontrolled economic and social change. They came to be 14 seen as the most innocent yet most crippled causalities of the era while remaining the greatest hope for a better future. In this way, saved children could become saviors themselves.24

Protection also sprang from a renewed embrace of the ancient European doctrine of parens patriae. That doctrine recognized the power of the state to act as a parent of all dependents, including children. In colonial America and through much of the nineteenth century, the assumption that parents would properly care for their children limited its reach. Intervention only occurred in the families of those men and women who had clearly failed to provide for their offspring. In those cases courts and welfare officials used the doctrine to remove children from homes where they were suffering from neglect and to justify their placement in institutions or to bind them out as apprentices. In most instances, though, the assumption that children had few separate interests or needs apart from their families stifled serious challenges to parental governance while also limiting a direct relationship between children and the state.25

Late nineteenth century stories of endangered children like Mary Ellen led to demands that the doctrine be extended to protect children whose parents placed them in physical or moral danger. Reformer Bryon C. Matthews explained why when he contended that while "the relation of the parent to child is to be sacredly guarded …general welfare should be more sacredly guarded." Doing so, however, meant an even clearer acceptance of separate legal identities for the young and an even greater retreat from the assumption that the interests of 15 children and parents always coincided. Consequently, demands to reinvigorate the parens patriae power of the state led to the repeated use of the metaphor of the “state as parent” to justify expanding the reach of public authority over all children not just those in immediate jeopardy. Reverend Lloyd Jenkins of Illinois expressed the new logic in 1898: "all children are children of the state, or none are."26

Over the course of the late nineteenth century, protection grew more and more appealing as a way to aid endangered children because it effectively balanced the competing interests involved in child saving. It clearly asserted that children had the right to call on the larger society for assistance and thus drew on new ideas of childhood asserting that children constituted a special category of citizens who deserved special assistance. At the same time, as Field had made clear, the new understanding of protection also implied that such demands would be unusual since most children would be reared properly by their parents. Protection thus balanced the new determination to aid endangered children with a renewed commitment to family privacy for the rest of nation's young.

Yet from the very start the new understanding of protection contained a double meaning: protecting children from society and protecting society from children. American boy's club organizer J.F. Atkinson vividly voiced this duality with a warning about the street waif: "If we do not pull him up, he will pull us down."27 Protecting endangered children thus expressed a basic tension later 16 identified by historian Robert Bremner: “Positively stated, the argument emerged that in a children, as future citizens, are the state's most valuable resource; for its own security the state must enforce the children's right to the nurture that will best equip them for responsible citizenship. Negatively stated, the argument assumed that the state must protect itself against the menace of hordes of young people allowed to grow up in ignorance and without discipline or respect for others."28 Though at particular moments either or both a fear for children or would dominate, from this era forward these contradictory sentiments proved critical to American attitudes and policies toward the young.

Battling Cruelty

Disgust at the physical mistreatment of Mary Ellen drove Bergh, Gerry, and other members of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to

Animals into a battle against cruelty to children. It made the pioneers of child protection in America. They acted out of a new understanding of cruelty whose sources lay in the fusion of the era's increasing determination to protect endangered children with a growing moral opposition to the purposeful infliction of physical pain.

Late in the nineteenth century new sentiments about discipline and punishment challenged traditional beliefs that individuals must endure physical suffering as personal misfortune, an act of God, and a punishment for sin. In 17 the United States, decades of agitation against beating slaves, spanking students, whipping prisoners, and flogging sailors sapped support for physical punishment. The horrors of the Civil War with its tales of battlefield barbarity and its returning army of amputees increased concern about pain and suffering.

The postwar development of pain relieving drugs reinforced the growing aversion to physical suffering. As historian James Turner argues, the "dread of pain – that 'instinctive' revulsion from the physical suffering of others" became

"uniquely characteristic of the modern era."29

The word cruelty came to stand for a new sensibility that freedom from physical coercion and deliberately inflicted pain was an essential right.Societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals became its first institutional expression.

Not surprisingly, then, even before Mary Ellen's story erupted in the public press, journalists had alluded to children as “human animals” who were as worthy of protection from cruelty as were horses, cattle, and dogs. The humane literature of the time added to this perception by referring to children as “little animals” and emphasizing the common defenselessness of animals and children and therefore their common right to protection. Darwinism lent further support with its evolutionary linkage of humans and animals. Those concerned about endangered children began to argue that boys and girls possessed an even greater capacity for suffering than animals since humans were the apex of the evolutionary chain.30 18

Yet, as Bergh, Gerry, and their supporters well knew, combating cruelty to children, like all intervention to protect the young, meant confronting entrenched parental rights. Perhaps none was more sacrosanct than the right to discipline a child. Law and custom had long granted parents an almost unrestrained power to determine the form and severity of their children’s punishment. Child-rearing advisors since John Locke in the seventeenth century had counseled parents to discipline their offspring and reminded them that sparing the rod spoiled the child. Biblical injunctions in favor of gave the practice potent scriptural support. Historian Philip Greven insists that “[r]eligous rationales for physical punishments have been, and remain, among the most powerful and influential theoretical justifications for violence known in the

Western world. For generations, they have woven the threads of pain and suffering into the complex fabric of our characters and cultures."31

Consequently, the widely held conviction that parental discipline was necessary to ensure well-governed homes meant that few parents had been called to account for excessive punishment and that abuse had long been sheltered by the commitment to family privacy.

However, the growing revulsion to pain and suffering in late nineteenth

America and new questioning of parents sowed seeds of doubt about unregulated parental discipline. And even though Mary Connolly had instantly become the era's most infamous child abuser, concern about cruelty toward children emerged most directly out of decades of agitation against men who beat 19 their wives and children – a staple of nineteenth-century anti-drink and women's rights campaigners. A barrage of stories of drunken and abusive men engaged in gambling, whoring, fist fighting, and other social evils filled magazines, newspapers, reform tracts, and domestic advice manuals. Disgust with their actions encouraged a new standard of parental, especially fatherly, behavior within the middle classes that stressed self-mastery and restraint. The internalization of self-control undermined support for externally imposed discipline and thus the use of whipping and beating as legitimate punishments for children. The new standard was to be embraced by men of all classes and imposed on those resisted.32

Judges made it easier to confront brutish parents by curbing the traditional common law parental right of chastisement. During the 1820s New

York judge and law writer James Kent had broadcast the orthodox rule in his immensely influential commentaries on American law: "The rights of the parents result from their duties. As they are bound to maintain and educate their children, the law has given a right to such authority; and in support of that authority, a right to the exercise of such discipline as may be requisite for the discharge of their sacred trust."33 This blanket endorsement of parental authority meant that few formal legal restraints were placed on the way fathers and mothers punished their offspring. Harshness was a matter for families and communities to determine and deter through informal controls. And children's own complaints were silenced by legal rules that barred minors from suing their 20 parents for injuries. In a typical ruling, the North Carolina Supreme held in 1838 that child cruelty was limited to those acts that endangered life, limbs, health, or caused disfigurement or permanent injury.34

However, post Civil War American judges narrowed the scope of legitimate parental discipline. In striking a new balance between parental disciplinary rights and state regulation, they substituted a new legal standard of moderate or reasonable correction for the old one of endangerment of life and limb. The Illinois Supreme Court explained the shift 1869 when it insisted that parental authority must be exercised "within the bounds of reason and humanity." In refusing to defer to the judgment of stepparents who had kept their blind son in an unheated, damp cellar for days at a time during the winter and then tried to rid him of vermin by pouring kerosene on him and lighting it, the justices declared unequivocally: "it is monstrous to hold that under the pretense of sustaining parental authority, children must be left, without the protection of the law, at the mercy of depraved men or women, with liberty to inflict any species of barbarity short of the actual taking of life."35

Growing opposition to corporal punishment also undermined the disciplinary power of parents. As has been the case ever since, almost no one opposed corporal punishment absolutely. Instead, debate focused on questions of abuse: physical abuse, abuse of power. Critics admonished teachers and parents to use moral suasion not the rod to quell youthful disobedience. In expressing the dual fear of and for children at the heart of American policies 21 toward children, they argued that cruelty threatened not only its young victims but the well-being of the nation by stunting the physical and moral development of its future citizens and workers.36

Though corporal punishment remained widely practiced, a regime of moderation emerged in middle class homes and the republic’s courtrooms. For example, some wives who filed for divorce on grounds of cruelty justified their actions in part by charging their husbands had crossed the line separating legitimate punishment and child cruelty. An Oregon woman complained that her husband had whipped their children in a manner that was "very severe and unnecessary and vicious;" another declared that her husband had been

"'unnecessarily abusive' to their children."37 The drive to set new boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate punishment received additional support when the state of New Jersey banned corporal punishment in its schools as did several municipalities including New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and Cleveland. Though enforcement of the new policy was uneven, the bans stood as potent expressions of the determination to limit physical punishment of the young.

Demands for complete bans in homes or schools never succeeded, but moderation became the new measure of physical punishment.38

Seven months after Mary Connolly’s conviction these various changes in attitudes and policies about physical cruelty to children coalesced to turn the inchoate rage at her brutalization of Mary Ellen into the first child protection crusade. Gerry took the lead. The wealthy New Yorker and grandson of one of 22 the Republic’s founders turned to fellow male elites who shared his concern about victimized children and his fears about the social disorder they represented.According to the Times, at a December 1874 meeting Gerry and allies such as banker August Belmont, railroad and ship owner Cornelius

Vanderbilt, and manufacturer and railroad magnate Peter Cooper concluded that existing child care agencies simply could not protect children like Mary Ellen:

"These societies, however, only assured the care of their inmates after they had been legally placed in their custody. It was not in the province of these excellent institutions to seek out and rescue from the dens and slums of the City the little unfortunates whose lives were rendered miserable by the system of cruelty and abuse which was constantly practiced upon them by the human brutes who happened to possess the custody or control of them." Nor did municipal officials have the resources to police families properly and enforce existing laws against the mistreatment of children.

Instead, an entirely new organization was needed. It must have the power and determination "to enforce legally, but energetically, the existing laws and to secure the conviction and punishment of every violation of any of those laws."39 So they created the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to

Children. A pledge written by Bergh explained the intent of the new organization: "The undersigned, desirous of rescuing the unprotected children of this city and State from the cruelty and demoralization which neglect and abandonment engender, hereby engage to aid, with their sympathy and support, 23 the organization and working of a Children's Protective Society, having in view the realization of so important a purpose."40

Bergh supported but did not actively participate in the new organization; he continued to devote most of his energies to animal protection. John Wright, a

Quaker shipping owner and leather importer who had turned to philanthropy in his retirement, became the NYSPCC's first president. Gerry left the SPCA to become the Society's first general counsel. He also became its major theoretician, tactician, and after Wright's death in 1879 its president for the rest of the century.41

Organizing Protection

Gerry molded the Society into what became a prototype child protection organization. He did so as a social policy entrepreneur. Like his business counterparts transforming American corporations, Gerry's innovations created a new organizational approach and structure for children's policies. And the impact of these innovations proved as long-lasting as those of Rockefeller and

Carnegie.

In his search for a new organizational order, Gerry knew, and indeed intended, that direct action to aid children like Mary Ellen would ignite a new conflict over the sanctity of the home. The conflict played itself out in a particularly American fashion: more and more Americans like Gerry fearful of the toll of industrial society demanded a new balance between public and private interests. Framing state policies toward the family in metaphoric terms of 24 balancing led to the depiction of conflicts over households with individual and family rights on one side and state regulation on the other. For instance, the right of a parent like Mary Connolly to discipline a child as she saw fit was placed on one side; the state interest in regulating parental discipline of children like

Mary Ellen was placed on the other. Equally important, neither in this era nor in any other has there ever been complete unanimity on tilting family governance in only one way. Quite the contrary, there have always been time-bound contests about how to strike the proper balance between individual rights and state interests.42

Gerry could act because, as we have seen, the stories about abused children like Mary Ellen crystallized fears for the family and especially for children supported a tilt in policies toward greater state regulation of American households. Only the state commanded the resources and authority to address the massive problems of the period including the crisis of the family.

Consequently, he could tap into a new faith in use of the coercive authority of the state to construct a just society and with it a new ethic of collective responsibility. Such sentiments encouraged an enlarged sense of the state's responsibility for social well-being. The result was a new understanding of the possibilities of state intervention to manage the population. Indeed the notion of state sanctioned social engineering emerged as a viable if bitterly constantly contested role for public agencies charged with overseeing everything from housing and nutrition to workplace safety and public morals. Inevitably these 25 issues became enmeshed in American party . Though intervening in homes was most often championed by reform-minded Republicans and often resisted by Democrats averse to ‘state paternalism,’ children and families served as centerpieces of revised attitudes toward state power in the United States.43

Gerry's most significant organizational response to these challenges was to place the Society on the borderline between the public and privates spheres of

American life. He made it at once a public organization and yet also a private one. The incorporation statute he drafted classified the Society a private agency with public authority like the Children's Aid Society. The act authorized the private agents of the societies to identify and prosecute abusive parents, and, if necessary, to remove children from their homes. Specifically, the incorporating statute gave the Society and others like it in the state of New York the power to

"prefer a complaint before any court or magistrate having jurisdiction for the violation of any law relating to or affecting children, and may aid in bringing the facts before such court or magistrate in any proceedings."44 And by 1881 legislators granted the Society the power to make arrests. They also allowed the

Society to define its clientele. Gerry and his colleagues determined that the statutory word children meant New Yorkers under the age of sixteen. The

Society's special status also enabled it to claim subsidies from the city, which averaged around $30,000 during its initial years – the equivalent of almost

$600,000 in 2006 dollars.45 However, as a private organization, control of the

SPCC rested with its board and members. The Society was thus insulated from 26 state control while endowed with public authority and public funds. That is, the

New York Society, and most of those that followed, was a purposely quasi- public/quasi-private organization. It combined the authoritative power of a state agency with the broad discretion, freedom from patronage and corruption, greater prestige, and propensity for innovation perceived to be the hallmarks of a private association. Private agents like Gerry served as public officials determining which abuses would be prosecuted and which would not.46

Mary Ellen’s story prompted this kind of policy innovation. Her protectors not only indicted her step-mother for cruelty, they charged local officials with negligence and castigated them for failing to protect endangered children like the young girl. The way the child had been shuttled around from one incompetent caretaker to another and then abandoned to her fate demonstrated, they argued, the incompetence of New York’s child care authorities. The Times worried about “the custodians of our public asylums who are not fastidious about the methods of disposing of their charges.” And its editors contended that the

Commissioner of Charities kept “a well-stocked child market, and anybody removed from the level of pauperism has only to go through the formality of signing an indenture to obtain the desired quantity of human flesh, one on which to work experiments, brutal or otherwise. Even the meaningless formula of reporting the condition of the child once a year may be dispensed with, as it was in this, the Mary Ellen case, without exciting either attention or inquiry.”47

Private agencies were hardly immune from similar charges, though they sparked 27 far fewer concerns.

The peculiar blend of public and private authority used to construct the

Society also illuminated the place of policies of protection in the new wave of humanitarian reform that began in the 1870s and lasted well into the twentieth century. A similar reform drive in antebellum America had found expression in a host of mass movements from abolitionism and women's rights to campaigns against corporal punishment and alcoholism as it had throughout European society.48 The second wave also fostered numerous campaigns, but differences between the two movements are far more revealing than commonalties. Most significantly, this new burst of humanitarianism evidenced much less faith in both privatism – especially self-policing – and individual and family autonomy, and, conversely, a much greater faith in public authority and the authority of experts.49 Equally important, like the first and like the new understanding of protection, the second wave of humanitarian reform was a trans-Atlantic movement of shared ideas, concerns and practices – what Michel Foucault and

Jacques Donzelot call a "discursive movement". Modernity, whether in London,

Paris, or New York, seemed threatening, and it seemed to threaten Europeans and North Americans with very similar perils. The common priorities, assumptions, and tactics of these movements suggest the need to understand the second way of humanitarian reform within a broad framework of state reconstruction and reform that occurred throughout Western Europe and North

America but that also developed in partially distinctive manner in each nation.50 28

Like other humanitarian reformers of the era, the creators of the NYSPCC discounted the possibility of individual self-reformation and turned to the coercive authority of the state to combat child abuse. And yet, on the other hand, concern about excessive governmental power, especially over the nation's homes, persisted and made all policies that relied on an active state suspect.

Perhaps to a greater degree than in any other Western nation, calls for increased public regulation of parents and children in the United States confronted a deep- seated tradition of antistatism that remained strong despite the massive changes wrought by industrialism. Equally challenging, under the terms of American federalism each state retained primary jurisdiction over families and children unlike in the unitary governments of nations like Britain and France. Though never completely exceptional, the persistent power of American antistatism and the realities of American federalism meant that the turn to the state was more difficult and less complete in the United States than it most European nations.

The anti-cruelty campaign balanced these concerns with its purposeful blurring of public and private authority. In doing so, Gerry and his allies expanded the precedent created by organizations such as the Children's Aid

Society that had established private agencies as the leading creators and enforcers of American social policy. Though European child protection campaigns also relied on private philanthropy, the prominence and power of nongovernmental agencies in the United States was more pronounced.51 As noted most famously by the touring French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, 29 voluntary associations thrived in American because of a fundamental faith in a vibrant civil society. Civil society describes the social space between the family and state -- a space of public discourse and action carried on by individuals who band together in non-governmental or quasi-governmental organizations, institutions, and movements.52

The nineteenth century United States was a particularly fertile soil for an extensive civil society because of its relatively weak and decentralized system of governance. In contrast to more bureaucratically developed European states, the American tradition of limited government privileged private action and repeatedly undermined popular faith in the ability of public authorities to resolve social and economic problems. The massive corruption and political party favoritism that earned this era its label of the Gilded Age only intensified concerns about the competence and venality of government bureaucrats. In the late nineteenth century reliance on civil society fueled the activism of organizations from the American Medical Association and National Association of

Manufacturers to the Order of Hibernians and National League for the Protection of the Family. Americans depended on such organizations to identify and attack social ills. Ideas and policies developed by these groups were broadcast to the citizenry through newspapers, magazines, journals, books, conferences, professional associations, and the other mediums of the public sphere. Charity worker Wheeler's decision to rescue Mary Ellen by turning to the president of the

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the barrage of stories about 30 the battered girl that then filled New York's newspapers illustrates the operation of American civil society and central place of children in it.53

Gerry’s decision to make the SPCC a private organization rested on these realities. The reliance on institutional hybridization in the first children’s protection campaign thus reveals that the emerging American variant of the

Western European welfare state retained a lingering uneasiness with public power. Instead of creating an expanding public bureaucracy, it relied on strategies that used tax incentives, public subsidies, and dispersed authority to restrain the growth of the state with private agencies authorized to tackle public problems.54

In another instance of a distinctive American approach to social welfare that legal scholar Robert Kagan has termed “adversarial legalism,” the New York

Society made child protection heavily dependent on the law. A lawyer who at thirty-three had left a thriving private practice to serve as counsel for the SPCA,

Gerry had prosecuted animal abusers and drafted legislation to curb various forms of animal abuse. He wanted to use the same tactics in the campaign against cruelty to children. Gerry conceived of child protection primarily in terms of law enforcement and advocated criminalizing the cruel treatment of children as the major remedy for child abuse. Indeed part of his rationale for creating the Society was the failure of the police to prosecute crimes against children because, as he explained in 1882, they “were engaged in the prosecution … of offenses of a graver legal character and … could not be expected to discover and 31 prosecute those who claimed the right to ill-treat the children over whom they had an apparent legal control.”55

Gerry insisted that the Society's authorizing statute made child cruelty a separate and distinct form of parental misconduct and grounds for taking a child from its home and punishing an abusive parent. In an 1881 address to the

American Humane Association, Gerry declared emphatically that the NYSPCC was

"simply created as a hand affixed to the arm of the law, by which the body politic reaches out and enforces the law. The arm of the law seizes the child when it is in an atmosphere of impurity, or in the care of those who are not fit to be entrusted with it, wrenches the child out of these surroundings, brings it to the court, and submits it to the decision of the court – unless, on the other hand, it reaches out that arm of the law to the cruelist, seizes him within its grasp, and brings him also to the criminal court and insures his prosecution and punishment."56 Though conceding that law enforcement generally ought to be left to public officials, he insisted that "there are certain branches of the law which seem peculiarly to require the creation of corporations for their enforcement, in order to protect those who are unable to protect themselves; and especially in dealing with offenders who are wealthy, influential and powerful, and who might and do often exert influences which are powerless without a corporation. And this is particularly the reason for the creation of societies for the prevention of cruelty to children."57 32

Gerry and his allies used the law not only as a coercive force but also as a means of enhancing the status of children like Mary Ellen. Our aim, Gerry declared unequivocally, is "to aid suffering childhood, through the law, by the law, and under the law. It is the hand of the law, the fingers of which trace charges of injury to children and fasten the grasp of the law upon the offender."

Doing so, he argued, required recognizing the fundamental "axiom that at the present day in this country, children have some rights which even parents are bound to respect."58

In an 1892 magazine article Kate Douglas Wiggin, author of the bestselling novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, made the case for children’s rights. Though she acknowledged the dominion that parents had over their children, she refused to accept that they owned their offspring. Instead she designated the parent as “a divinely appointed guardian who acts for his child until he attains what we call the age of discretion, that highly uncertain period which arrives late in life with some persons and never arrives at all with others.”

Even so, Wiggin admitted that since the “rights of the parent being almost unlimited, it is a very delicate matter to decide just when and where they infringe upon the rights of the child.” Inevitably parents controlled their offspring’s food, clothing, religion, health care, and other vital services because of the inherent dependency of the young. Yet she refused that concede that children, even though dependent, had no rights; quite the contrary, she warned that the denial of rights itself constituted a danger for children since it left them 33 even more defenseless against their parents and other adults. Consequently, she insisted that children must have their own rights: “When a child is born, one of his inalienable rights, which we often deny him, is the right to his childhood …

There is no substitute for a genuine, free, serene, healthy, bread-and-butter childhood.” Those rights, she explained, included the right to be “well born; to not be made a fashion plate, to get dirty, to real toys … a right to a place of his own, to things of his own, to surroundings which have some relation to his size, his desires, and his capabilities.”59

The determination of those like Wiggins and Gerry to endow children with rights demonstrated that by the late nineteenth century rights had become an indispensable way for Americans to assert their demands and given them a privileged status. Examples abounded, they ranged from successes of the campaigns for married women’s property rights to the triumphant struggles of freed slaves for the right to have their marriages recognized as lawful. The appeal of rights as a way to elevate the cause of anti-cruelty and trump the opposition was simply too powerful to resist.

At the same time, the call for rights by Wiggins, Gerry, and other child protectors promoted what would become a characteristic strategy of the era: turning children’s needs into legal rights and then using those rights to justify intervening in homes to protect endangered girls and boys. Despite the example of a Mary Ellen pleading in a courtroom for her own salvation, defining children’s rights solely in term of basic needs sprang from the paternalistic assumption that 34 children were dependents whose innate incapacities meant that they lacked the ability to assess their own interests effectively and assert their own demands independently. Critically, child advocates like Wiggins and Gerry did not equate children’s rights with adult rights and thus did not consider them claims of individual independence and liberty that the young could assert themselves. As a result, reformers had to create a language of paternalistic rights that defined children's rights in special terms of needs and parental failure. They did so by making prolonged childhood the most fundamental right of the young and then recasting education, socialization, nurture, and other basic needs as additional rights. In this way, the first child protectors fashioned a new strain of rights: a distinctive age-based conception of rights, steeped in paternalism that translated children's needs into rights without jettisoning their dependent status. Thus

Raymond Fuller could insist in 1922: "out of the nature of children arise their needs; and out of children's needs, children's rights."60 Nevertheless, despite the irresistible lure of rights, granting them to children remained a problematic endeavor even as an act of paternalism. From the start, the belief in rights as expressions of individual power and the assumed dependency of the young threatened to subvert every claim of children’s rights.61

Gerry and the New York child protectors relied on the law and blending of public and private authority in their effort to make freedom from abuse a right of childhood. Success, however, meant not simply securing new statutes and demanding rights for children but also overcoming fears that the Society would 35 unjustifiably invade homes and snatch children from their parents' arms. The problem was all the more difficult because despite the emerging new standards of legitimate punishment most New Yorkers still considered physical abuse a far less legitimate reason for removing children from their homes than neglect. The

New York Sun voiced these concerns in 1875 when it editorialized against granting the Society the power to take children from their parents and commit them to institutions. Turning to ridicule, the editorial writers scoffed that they knew of "more babies in New York who are about to be spanked too hard than there animals that are cruelly treated … Would Mr. Bergh confiscate all these babies … Where would he take them?"62

Members of the Society responded to such attacks by trumpeting their commitment to traditional American family values, particularly their acceptance of corporal punishment. At the organization’s very first meeting, Bergh expressly supported the right of parents and their authorized custodians such as teachers to punish a child so long as it was done for the proper reasons and in a moderate manner. The Times told the city’s parents that "[w]hile anxious to protect children from undue severity," the advocate endorsed "a good wholesome flogging, which he often found most efficacious." Bergh also cautioned the Society to avoid petty instances of mistreatment and to take on

"only the atrociously bad cases."63 In 1882 Gerry expressed similar sentiments:

"where the parent properly discharges the parental functions, the society so far from interfering, frequently and with success aids that parent in the reclamation 36 of the erring, the willful, and the disobedient child. It is only when the parent exceeds the proper exercise of the parental functions, or omits or refuses to perform those functions, that the society protects the child against the parent

…"64

In a city and nation torn asunder by religious conflict, the Society also had to address the fears of Catholic parents that that the new organization was a

Protestant cabal designed, as the Times reported, to "interfere with the religion of Roman Catholic children." These fears sprang from a clear understanding that evangelical Protestantism sustained and informed movements like the SPCC even if its creators did not intend to turn organization into the advance guard of a particular denomination. Gerry tried to assuage their concerns by explaining that the statute incorporating the Society instructed judges to place children with members of their own faith. And he pledged to make sure that "all Roman

Catholic children would be placed in Roman Catholic institutions."65 Placating the fears of these parents was critical because Catholics were creating a diverse system of schools, orphanages, and other institutions to care for neglected and abused children by those of their own faith. Jews were in the process of creating a similar system. These intricate systems of faith-based institutions compelled

Gerry to make their members supporters not opponents in the crusade to protect endangered children.

The idea pioneered by the NYSPCC of preventing cruelty to children by creating child protection organizations spread quickly throughout the republic 37 and Western Europe. As dictated by American federalism, the movement in the

United States grew only state by state as legislative authorization was secured in statehouse after statehouse. There could be no unified national campaign as in

France or Britain. In two years seven more societies had been founded in the

United States, 150 by 1900, 200 by 1910, and the numbers kept growing. Most of the organizations were in northern and Midwestern cities.66 Not only did societies to combat child abuse proliferate, but so did anticruelty statutes modeled on the initial New York legislation.67 Though many organizations combined protective work for children and animals most eventually specialized in aiding brutalized girls and boys. And the SPCCs also became part of a larger movement in 1885 when the American Humane Association formed a Children's

Division. The Association’s seal depicted the protection of animals on one side and the protection of children on the other.

Perils of Practice

As the anti-child cruelty societies began policing American families, they quickly discovered the difficulties of trying to protect children. Mary Ellen's story had etched a clear template that all of the societies eagerly tried to reproduce.

However, not only did child protectors have to confront horrifying instances of child abuse like the brutal treatment Mary Ellen had endured, they also stumbled into the inherent conflicts of their crusade. In the working-class and immigrant neighborhoods of New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the other cities 38 where the campaign against child cruelty began, child protectors generated a volatile mix of cooperation, resistance, and opposition. As a result, the response of fathers, mothers, children, kin, and neighbors and not simply the intent and tactics of child protectors determined how the campaigns against child cruelty would begin.68

Child protectors broadcast their determination to prevent child cruelty in stories of battered children that filled the first SPCC reports and fundraising brochures. Typically, the initial report of the Massachusetts Society for the

Prevention of Cruelty to Children shared shocking tales about victimized children like Mary Ellen: a man arrested for incestuous relations with his twelve year old daughter, another convicted of assaulting a nine year old girl, two other nine year old girls beaten and abused by their parents, three children two to five years old abandoned by their father and left with a drunken mother, and five young children taught to lie and steal by their parents. Each tale justified intervention, protection, and public support as the report's conclusion made clear: "Hundreds of cases could be added to the above, but from these the general nature of the work can be appreciated."69

Publishing tales of rescued girls and boys became the primary public relations tactic of the anti-child cruelty movement like all social reform movements of the era from public health to legal aid. Told vividly as sagas of good and evil just like the sensational stories splashed across newspaper pages, the case studies were intended to generate an emphatic response that child 39 protectors hoped would expand a reader’s sense of moral responsibility and open their pocketbooks. The stories relied on the discourse of disgust to stigmatize child abusers and valorize actions against them. They also suggested why stories about child victims like Mary Ellen became a recurrent feature of child protection. They turned abstract problems facing children into a specific drama cast with real people with whom others could identify and then judge.70

While child protectors cultivated support among the genteel classes by harnessing the power of storytelling, they never considered that child abuse might traverse class and ethnic lines. Instead they wanted the stories to send a very different message to the working class and immigrant families that they knew were the breeding grounds of unfit parents and endangered children.

Realizing that they could never find and punish all child abusers, the organizations broadcast the stories as warnings to parents that they must abide by the new standards of appropriate child discipline or face the SPCC. John

Shortall, president of the Illinois Humane Society, explained the intent of SPCC propaganda in an 1897 address to the National Conference of Charities and

Corrections: “The effect upon a community of an active, well-organized, and well-governed humane society is obvious. The child-abuser’s knowledge of its jurisdiction grows rapidly, nearly every day’s public record presenting something for his consideration; and he receives much reliable information of its promptness in action and its thoroughness in the enforcement of the law, combined with the important fact that it can neither be browbeaten nor 40 humbugged, is neither corruptible nor otherwise acquiescent – all of which is, I believe absolutely true. These principles give a sense of protection from cruelty, which has thus at least a court to appeal to, an ear that listens, a heart that understands, a willing and an effective arm.”71 Social work pioneer Homer Folks testified to the success of this tactic when he reported that the societies’

"greatest beneficence has been, not to the children who have come under their care, but to the vastly larger number whose parents have restrained angry tempers and vicious impulses through fear of 'the cruelty.'"72

Yet child protectors could not ensure that their message was heard correctly. Officials of the Philadelphia SPCC were likely quite pleased when an informant told them in 1887 that one mother far from being a child abuser did not "whip the child at all, as she is afraid of this Society." On the other hand, the 1881 report of the Massachusetts anticruelty society acknowledged, "If we rescue from a tenement house a child who has been neglected or abused, every family in that house and neighborhood are warned ... For good reason, then residents of working-class neighborhoods referred to the SPCC as 'the Cruelty.'

When word got out that an SPCC agent was on the way, people shouted up and down the street, 'Investigation! Investigation!'"73 Such admissions conceded that child protectors sent mixed messages to the neighborhoods they policed. Their interest in protecting children like Mary Ellen from brutal treatment was clear, but so was their conviction that only failed immigrant and working class parents committed child abuse. 41

Through lessons like these child protectors quickly found that the reality of policing urban ghettos challenged both their ideal tales of child rescue and their understanding of working class and immigrant family life. Adopting the policing style of the SPCA, the societies relied on agents to root out child abuse. Often former policemen or firemen and generally without special training in child welfare work, these men responded to complaints like those Etta Wheeler filed with Bergh about Mary Connolly. The agents investigated a case by talking with the parents in question, other family members, neighbors, employers, and any other useful informants. They were thus dependent on family members and local residents for information. On the other hand, the agents had significant discretion. They could absolve parents, issue a warning, or seek removal of a child.74

The first agents prowling urban neighborhoods discovered not simply good and bad parents but a wide variety of families with conflicting needs, interests, and practices. Family diversity tested the child protectors' belief in a single standard of child rearing and their efforts to promote uniform forms of parental discipline. Mothers and fathers in targeted urban wards held their own convictions about proper family life and child rearing that played a critical role in determining their understanding of cruelty and other forms of child endangerment. Differing judgments about the strategies families used to survive also emerged. Begging, scavenging, pawning clothes and household goods, sending children to work on the streets selling newspapers or flowers, and even 42 petty theft and causal prostitution were considered child abuse by the societies but basic means of survival by many urban Americans.75

Encounters between families and child protectors took a variety of forms.

Many parents and children did indeed grow to fear "The Cruelty." The 1892 annual report of the Philadelphia SPCC ruefully noted: "The reformer will ever be considered an intruding enemy by those whose vicious plans he seeks to circumvent … He is apt to draw upon himself the hate and ill-will of the vicious and evil-doer." Even so, the societies needed cooperation. Agents found it hard to collect evidence, particularly when they could not overcome the legal privilege that prevented husbands and wives from testifying against each other or convince kin or neighbors to give information. They had to surmount not just the commitment to family privacy but also class, racial, religious, ethnic resentments, and language barriers that all fostered distrust of outsiders.

Though some residents refused to assistant anti-cruelty agents at all, and others greeted their arrival on a street with jeers and catcalls, the general response was more complicated as child protection was integrated into the working class tradition of self-policing. Local residents, particularly women, had long monitored street life in these communities. They used gossip, ostracism, direct confrontation, and, as a last resort, local magistrates to curb parental misconduct among their neighbors. The crowded tenements of urban ghettos made such local knowledge easy to acquire.76 Just as closed quarters and limited privacy ensured that Mary Ellen's screams would be heard by residents in 43 the Connolly's apartment house, so too knowledge of other battered children became known to neighbors. And yet neighborhood surveillance had failed Mary

Ellen and thousands of other children like her opening the way for the SPCC to make protection the responsibility of public and private agencies not just neighbors, friends, and families.77

The SPCC also became another weapon local resident could use enforce community norms of childcare, cleanliness, drinking, spending, and sociability by reporting offending parents. For example, a woman sought out the Philadelphia

SPCC in the early 1880s to complain that a mother's heavy drinking had forced her son and daughter to scavenge for food from gutters and garbage barrels.

Another woman on the block confirmed the charge and dismissed the woman as

"a disgrace to her sex.” Yet neighbors could also undermine charges by defending parents against what they considered to be unfair charges of child abuse and neglect. In 1893 another Philadelphia woman’s neighbors refuted charges that she had sent out her thirteen-year-old daughter Mamie out to beg.

They insisted to an agent that she was a "hardworking woman" who "works hard at the wash-tub, and tries to make a living for her children."78 Instances like these demonstrate how urbanites relied on their own notions of proper child rearing to either assist or challenge anti-cruelty agents. Working class and immigrant urbanites incorporated the anti-cruelty societies into their traditional forms of policing their communities without completely subscribing to the child protectors' standards of child rearing. Turning to the agencies became a last 44 resort to be used only when other remedies, including the newly potent threat to go to the Cruelty itself, failed.

The complex negotiations necessary to secure accusations and information compelled anti-cruelty agents to develop guidelines for wielding their discretion. Agents would not file complaints if they decided the charge had been leveled out of spite or for revenge. And, as Bergh had suggested at the

NYSPCC's first meeting, they made case-by-case determinations of whether a particular child had deserved a beating or not. The agents often sided with parents and refused to bring complaints forward. They also learned that judges were reluctant to punish natural parents without overwhelming evidence of either brutality or extreme neglect. So the agents tended to focus their energies on cruel employers and foster or adopted parents. Like many neighbors, agents overlooked abusive acts by parents who seemed otherwise temperate and industrious. They relied on warnings and demands that parents act with restraint in the future. As a result, most cases were resolved without taking children from their homes.79 Nevertheless, agents did remove a significant number of children, upwards of 90,000 by 1900. Even more important, as social worker Folks reported, the NYSPCC “became, by 1890, the factor which actually controlled the reception, care, and disposition of destitute, neglected, and wayward children in New York City, thus practically controlling the lives of an average number of about fifteenth thousand children, and an average annual expenditure for their support of more than one and one half million dollars.”80 45

Not surprisingly, critics of the new anti-cruelty organizations also sprang up throughout urban America. Labor leaders, working class politicians, radical reformers, and families themselves charged the societies with being more interested in policing morals than protecting children and with ignoring the root causes of poverty that led to child cruelty. Edward W. Townsend voiced some of these concerns in his 1895 novel A Daughter of the Tenements, the story of a single mother named Teresa who worked as a ballet dancer.Injured during a performance and fearful that the NYSPCC would take her baby daughter if she went to hospital, Teresa pleaded with a friend: "'Go to my room and take

Carminella before they get her. Hide her!" Townsend then used the narrator to speak directly to the reader: "It may be incumbent upon me to explain this little foolish fear of Teresa's about 'the Society,' as that Society is called which takes children of the poor, when the poor cannot help themselves. I explain only because it is proper that my readers should have the same sensible ideas about this matter that all other highly respectable and intelligent persons have.”

Townsend’s narrator then turned to storytelling himself to make his point: "Why,

I recall, for instance, the case of that Polish woman who was arrested because she could not make enough money in her little tobacco shop to pay the blackmailing demands of two police officers (she thought that they were collectors of legal taxes), and when she was sent to jail to teach her to work harder, 'the Society' took her children, and very properly. But when she came from jail, and found there was no law by which she could get her children away 46 from the Society, that unreasonable woman went insane. The doctors said that she went insane from grief, but I have my own opinion, and that is that she went insane through native, inborn, crass unreasonableness." And, bearing down on the reader, he wanted to make the lesson of this tale quite clear: "You see, those stories become known, and foolish and ignorant people like Teresa hear them, and are thus possessed by a wicked against the Society.”

The narrator then ended the story with his own moral: “I have made this little explanation because I should feel that I had been unjust to Teresa if I had not explained that she had some reasons, false and foolish reasons, to be sure, for her terror of that most respectable, kind, considerate, and at all times reasonable institution, 'the Society.'"81

Critiques like Townsend's forced anti-child cruelty campaigners to defend their practices. Frank B. Fay, the head of the Massachusetts society did so in the organization's seventh report. He insisted, "We never take a neglected child by law from their parents, where the neglect arises from honest poverty alone, for we would not thus punish misfortune; but we appeal to public or private organizations, and secure the protection and care of the child in its own or some other home. Nor do we take away such children forcibly, when one parent is worthy. We simply insist that the child shall be removed or be better cared for."82 Oblivious to the possibility that his understanding of honest poverty or worthy parents could be a subjective determination drawn his own class, racial, and ethnic , Fay returned to the issue in a talk to the 1893 International 47

Congress of Charities, Corrections, and Philanthropy by invoking children’s rights:

"[O]ur duty demands that, while we appreciate the loss of the parents, we think of the gain to the child. We should strive to be as kind in our action as a just enforcement of the law will permit, having a constant care, in cases of apparent neglect, to distinguish between the poor and destitute and unworthy and dissolute. But we have a constant duty to remember that these neglected children have more years before them of happiness or misery than their parents, and have not lost their rights by their own bad conduct; so that, if there is to be suffering by the severing of the family tie, the parents should be the sufferers, and the child have the 'right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."83

The complexities of battling child cruelty in America's urban neighborhoods meant that that the first child protection campaigns prompted a renegotiation of power and decision-making between some families and the state and within some families and neighborhoods. Immigrant and working class parents and their neighbors responded actively not passively to the drive against child cruelty. Their actions demonstrate that from the start the impoverished and the dependent played critical roles in the operation of child protection. They made the system more contingent, fluid, and unpredictable. And yet, the power of child protectors to police homes and remove children meant that the Cruelty could not be ignored. Child protection inevitably changed neighborhood controls and sanctions by creating new ways to aid endangered children. The rise of

SPCC policing of child cruelty paralleled the decline of neighborhood crime 48 control as self-policing began to give way to expanded municipal regulation of crimes from petty theft to rape. The shift revealed that the autonomy of neighborhoods not simply families was being renegotiated in this era.

Anti-cruelty reformers used protection against abuse to establish a new threshold of humane treatment of children. By 1935, along with the anti-cruelty laws that criminalized child abuse, 18 states and territories enacted statutes that codified the judicial injunction that parental punishment must be reasonable.84

However, as statutory reliance on the purposefully ambiguous word "reasonable" suggests, there were also limits to the success of anti-cruelty reformers. Their campaign had institutionalized without resolving a fundamental uncertainty about policing child abuse: locating the line between appropriate punishment and mistreatment.85 This uncertainty remained a permanent reality of all attempts to impose a uniform standard of punishment on the republic's families. Anti-cruelty reformers had shifted the balance of power between families and the state, but the commitment to parental rights and family autonomy remained a critical component of all efforts to regulate child punishment and abuse.

"I was in a courtroom full of men with pale, stern looks, saw a child brought in, carried in a horse blanket, at the sight of which men wept aloud," crusading journalist Jacob Riis recalled. "I saw it laid at the feet of the judge, who turned his face away, and in the stillness of the courtroom I heard a voice raised claiming for the child the protection that men had denied it, in the name 49 of the homeless cur on the street … I knew I was where the first chapter … of children's rights was written, under warrant of that made for the dog."86 Just as his stark photographs in How the Other Half Lives would forever document the suffering of urban children in late nineteenth century America, so Riis' dramatic recounting of Mary Ellen's 1874 hearing is a vivid testament to the primal role of child cruelty in the creation of child protection. By making Americans like Riis hear what fellow reformer John Spargo called “the bitter cry of the children,” anti-cruelty campaigners turned the child into a powerful icon of reform and child protection into a powerful new form of social policy.87 50

1 NYT, April 11. 1874. Exact biographical information on Mary Ellen, particularly about her first years of life and parentage, remain uncertain. However, all renditions end with her under the baleful care of Mary Connolly. For an overview see Lelia B. Costin, Howard Jacob Karger, and David Stoesz, The Politics of Child Abuse in America, 52-57.

2 NYT, April 10, 1874

3 NYT, April 22, 1874, December 27, 1875; and see.AHA Pamphlet #280: “The Story of Mary Ellen Which Started the Child Saving Crusade Through the World.” And for a critical assessment of the story see Lela B. Costin, “Unraveling the Mary Ellen Legend: Origins of the ‘Cruelty’ Movement,” Social Service Review, 65(1991), 203-23. For the complete newspaper accounts see the New York Times, April 10, 11, 14, 22 and December 27, 1874. After several months at the Sheltering Arms, Mary Ellen was sent to live in upstate New York with Etta Wheeler's sister. She grew up on a farm near Rochester. Mary Ellen married, bore two daughters, and died in 1956. Throughout her life she periodically participated in SPCC activities. Eric A. Shelman and Stephen Lazoritz, Out of the Darkness, The Story of Mary Ellen Wilson (Dolphin Moon Publishing, Lake Forest, CA, 1999), 326-32.

4 Song lyrics cited in Shelman and Lazoritz, Out of Darkness, 328-29.

5 Gregory Shaya, “The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860–1910,” AHR 109(2004), pp. 56-8

6 Barbara Nelson, Making An Issue of Child Abuse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 5; and see John M. Johnson, "Horror Stories and the Construction of Child Abuse," in Joel Best, ed. Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems (Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1989), 5-19.

7 New York Times, April 14, 1874.

8 Mona Lynch cite

9 Cited in Costin, The Politics of Child Abuse, 49

10 Quoted in Michael Willrich, "Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America," Journal of American History, 87(2000), 465. 51

11 For an overview of the American version of this family crisis see Michael Grossberg, "Balancing Acts: Crisis, Change, and Continuity in American Family Law, 1890-1990," Indiana Law Journal, 28(1995), 273-308; and Tiffin, In Whose Best Interests, chap. 5; Keller, Regulating A New Society, 13, 26-27. Tiffin, In Whose Best Interests,111-12; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 9-12

12 Howard Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton University Press, 1989), 4-5, and see Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York, 1985), chaps. 1-4; Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), chaps. 1-2.

13 Sharon Stephens, ed. Children and the Politics of Culture, 6. 14 [See of this is a direct quote] James Schultz, The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100-1350 (Philadelphia, 1995); for a general discussion of changing understandings about children and childhood in this era see Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (New York, 1995), chaps. 4,6.. 15 For similar developments in France, see Sylvia Schafer, Children in Moral Danger and the Problem of Government in Third Republic France (Princeton, 1997), 64, 80.

16 The Police Powers (Chicago, 1904), 248.

17 Quoted in Joseph Hawes, The Children's Rights Movement, A History of Advocacy and Protection (Boston, 1991), 72.

18 Tiffin, In Whose Best Interrests, 143-44; for a similar development in France see Schafer, 40-1

19 The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them (New York, 1872),

20 Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (New York, 1995), chap. 6.

21 "The Child and the State," 109

22 "The Child and the State," The Forum, 1(1886), 106-9.

23 Children in Moral Danger, 47.

24 For a discussion of the transatlantic nature of humanitarian reform in the 52

era see Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Harvard University Press, 1998), chaps. 1-4; see also Keller, Regulating A New Society, 2; Costin, The Politics of Child Abuse in America ,50.

25 Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, chap. 7; Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 75

26 Matthews and Jenkins are cited in Tiffin, In Whose Best Interest? 144, 218.

27 Quoted in Ashby, Endangered Children, 80.

28 “Other People’s Children,” Journal of Social History, 16(1983), 85.

29 Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 1; and for a discussion of the origins of this new sensibility about physical suffering see Elizabeth B. Clark, “’The Sacred Rights of the Weak,’: Pain, Suffering, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History, 82(1995), 463-93; and Myra Glenn, Campaigns Against Corporal Punishment.

30 Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 77-78. 31 Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse (New York, 1992), 94

32 Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives; Bederman, "'Civilization,' the Decline of Middle-Class Manliness and Ida B. Wells's Antilynching Campaign (1892-94)," Radical History Review (Winter 1992), 7; Ashby, Endangered Children, 58; Griswold, Fatherhood, 61-2.

33 2 Kent’s Commentaries on American Law 203, 11th ed, George E. Comstock, ed. Boston, Little Brown, 1867

34 Pendergrass v. State of NC (1838), and see Hewlett v. George, 68 Miss 703, 711 1891; for a different reading of the law see In Johnson v. State (1840) a Tenn appellate court held that any punishment exceeding the bounds of moderation was cruel. And see Mason P. Thomas, Jr. "Child Abuse and Neglect Part I: Historical Overview, Legal Matrix, and Social Perspectives," North Carolina Law Review 50(Feb. 1972), 293-349, 304, 304-5.

35 People v. Fletcher, 52 Illinois 395; and see People v. Turner, 55 Illinois (1870), 280, 284. And see Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 76-78. For a similar developments in the South that demonstrate the national scope of this change 53

see State v. Grisby, 38 Ark. 409, 410 (1882), and see generally Peter Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, Families, Sex & the Law in the Nineteenth Century South (Chapel Hill, 1995), 157-65

36 See for example, Lyman Cobb, The Evil Tendencies of Corporal Punishment As A Means of Moral Discipline in Families and Schools, Examined and Discussed (1847).

37 Cited in David Peterson, "Wife-Beating: An American Tradition," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23(1992), 105

38 N. Ray Hiner, "Children's Rights, Corporal Punishment, and Child Abuse, Changing American Attitudes, 1870-1920," Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 43(1979), 241-44; Donald Raichle, "School Discipline and Corporal Punishment, An American Retrospective," Interchange 7(1977-78), 71-2. For a compelling argument against ahistorical interpretations of past attitudes and policies toward children see Catherine J. Ross, "The Lessons of the Past: Defining and Controlling Child Abuse in the United States," in George Gerbner, Catherine J. Ross, and Edward Zigler, eds. Child Abuse: An Agenda for Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980,), 63-81, especially 64-5, 80-81. 39 Times, 12/17/1874.

40 Bergh pledge cited in Shelman and Lazoritz, Out of the Darkness, 333. For analyses of the founding of the NYSPCC see Joyce Antler and Stephen Antler, "From Child Rescue to Family Protection, The Evolution of the Child Protection Movement in the United States," Children and Services Review, 1(1979), 177-204; Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, chap. 4

41 Costin, The Politics of Child Abuse, 65; Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 73.

42 For a general assessment of these issues see "Note: Looking for a Family Resemblance: The Limits of the Functional Approach to the Legal Definition of the Family," Harvard Law Review, 104(1991), 1640-50; and Grossberg, "Balancing Acts: Crisis, Change, and Continuity in American Family Law, 1890-1990," Indiana Law Review, 28(1995), 275-89.

43 Hamilton Cravens, "Child Saving in Modern America, 1870s-1990s" in Roberta Wollons, ed. Children at Risk in America, History, Concepts, and Public Policy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 4; and see James Scott, Seeing Like A State (New Haven, 1998), 91-92; Rebecca Edwards, “Domesticity Versus Manhood Rights, Republicans, Democrats, and ‘Family Values’ Politics, 1856-1896,” in Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. 54

Zelizer, eds. The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American History (Princeton, 2003), 175-97.

44 "An Act of the incorporation of societies for the prevention of cruelty to children," 1875 – ch. 130, Laws of New York (Albany, 1881), p. 114.

45 This calculation is based the conversion program in John J. McCusker, "Source Note for How Much is That Worth Today" Economic History Services, 2003, URL : http://www.eh.net/hmit/ppowerusd/dollarsource.php. For an updated version see http://www.measuringworth.com/index.html And for a discussion of the complications of the subsidy system see Costin, The Politics of Child Abuse, 72; Jill Eliane Hasday, “Parenthood Divided: A Legal History of the Bifurcated Law of Parental Relations,” The Georgetown Law Journal, 90(2002), 305-8; Brace helped pioneer the ‘NY System’ which allocated public monies to private charities for social services Brace, Dangerous Classes, 277-78; Michael Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 125-26. 46 See, for example, the "Act of the Incorporation of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children," Laws of NY, 1875, chap. 130, p. 114. 1881, chap. 130, p. 114. And for an analysis of the links between morals policing and child protection see Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents, Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton University Press, 1997). 47 New York Times, April 11, 1974, p. 6; and see Times, April 14, 1874. p 4; April 17, 1874, p. 4; Apil 30, 1874; and Mason P. Thomas, Jr., “Child Care and Neglect, Historical Origins, Legal Matrix and Social Perspectives,” Part 1, North Carolina Law Review, 50(1972), 308

48 And thus the child protection efforts are best thought of as discursive movements. For an analysis of such efforts see Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. by Colin Gordon (New York, 1980); Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York, 1979). And for an application of this approach see Polsky, The Rise of the Therapeutic State.

49 For an insightful discussion of these issues see Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” American Historical Review, 90(1985), 339-61, 547-66; and ibid, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth- Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana, IL, 1977), chap. 1.

50 Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Harvard University Press, 1998), chaps. 1-4; see also Keller, Regulating A New Society, 2; John Muncie, “Youth Justice and the Governance of Young People: 55

Global, International, National, and Local Contexts,” in Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh and Ronald Kassimir, eds. Youth, Globalization, and the Law (Stanford University Press, 2007), 26-8; and Foucault and Donzelot

51 George Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870-1908 (1982) 216-23; Schafer, Children in Moral Danger, 143; Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, MA., 1996), 134. 52 For a general discussion of civil society see Adam Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (New York, 1992).

53 Gary G. Hamilton and John R. Sutton, “The Problem of Control in the Weak State, Domination in the United States, 1880-1920,” Theory and Society, 18(1989), 1-46; Kathryn Kish Sklar, "The Historical Foundations of Women's Power in the Creation of the American Welfare States," in Koven and Michel, Mothers of a New World, 43-93. Novak, Stephen Sugarman, “‘A Hatred of Disorder’: Legal Science, Liberalism, and Imperialism,” in Peter Fitzpatrick, ed. Dangerous Supplements, Resistance and Renewal in Jurisprudence (Pluto Press, 1991), 60; Skocpol, Protecting Mohters. For a discussion of these issues in France, see Shafer, Children and Moral Danger, 143

54 Cravens, "Child Saving," 4

55 Gerry cite; Robert A. Kagan, Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001).

56 Cited in Costin, The Politics of Child Abuse, 79.

57 Elbridge Gerry, “The Relation of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to Child-Saving Work,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (1882), 9:129.

58 Ibid.

59 [Wiggin, “Children’s Rights,” Scribner’s Magazine, August, 1892, 242, 244-7; Children’s Rights: A Book of Nursery Logic (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1892); Costin, 63; Mintz, Huck, 183]

60 For a general discussion of children’s rights in this era see Michael Grossberg, “Children’s Legal Rights? A Historical Look at a Legal Paradox,” in 56

Roberta Wollons, ed. Children at Risk in America, History, Concepts, and Public Policy (Albany, NY, 1993), 119-26. 61 Catherine J. Ross, “Of Children and Liberty: An Historians View,” American Journal of Orthopyschiartry, 52(1982), 477-78; Grossberg, “The Paradox of Children’s Rights,” 114-26.

62 Quoted in Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 75-76.

63 NYT, 12/29/1874

64 “The Relation of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to Child-Saving Work,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (1882), 9:130; and see Hasday, “Parenthood Divided,” 334-5

65 Times, 12/29/1874; and see Macleod, Age of Child, 27; Sally in CHLA, Linda P.

66 N. Ray Hiner, “Children’s Rights, Corporal Punishment, and Child Abuse, Changing American Attitudes, 1870-1920,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic,43(1979), 235; and see Homer Folks, "Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children," Charities Review, 10(1900), 43-45; Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 69-87; Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 157-9.

67 McCrea, The Humane Movement, 137; Robert Bremner, Children and Youth in America (Cambridge, 1971), 2: 201-2; Costin, The Politics of Child Abuse, 60-67.

68 Keller, Regulating A New Society, 11; and see generally Schafer, Children and Moral Danger, 89-90.

69 Massachusetts SPCC First Annual Report (Boston, 1881), 31-33.

70 For a discussion of the power of stories in defining citizenship see Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood, The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge, 2003), 45-49; For a fuller discussion of the role of legal narratives see Michael Grossberg, A Judgment for Solomon, The d'Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 1996); and for an assessment of the use of stories in contemporary child abuse cases see Nelson, Making an Issue of Child Abuse

71 “Child-Saving Work of the Humane Societies,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, Boston, 1897 57

72 Care of Destitute, Dependent, and Delinquent Children, 175.

73 Cited in Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, , 51-52

74 Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 81-86; Hawes, The Children’s Rights Movement, 22-24. And for similar policing methods in Britain see Behlmer for same thing in GB 171-5

75 Sherri Broder, "Informing 'the Cruelty': The Monitoring of Respectability in Philadelphia's Working Class Neighborhoods in the Late Nineteenth Century," Radical America, 21(August-July 1987): 36, 41; and see Hawes, The Children’s Rights Movement, 24

76 Christine Stansel, City of Women, 60-61.

77 For the most compelling assessments of the daily work of the societies see Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, ; Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children.

78 Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, 38-42; and see Alan Steinberg, The Transformation of Criminal Justice, Philadelphia, 1800-1880 (Chapel Hill, 1989).

79 Tiffin, 147 – fn 15; Hawes, 22-3; Pleck, 70, Stephen J. Pfohl, “The ‘Discovery’ of Child Abuse, Social Problems 24(1976-77), 310-23; Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 82-3.

80 Care of Destitute, Dependent, and Delinquent Children, 173; Hasday, “Parenthood Divided,” 307.

81 A Daughter of the Tenements (New York, 1895), 12-13, 25-27; Bremner, Children and Youth in America, 2:210-11.

82 Cited in Bremner, Children and Youth in America, 2:208.

83 "The Protection of Neglected and Abused Children," in Anna Gorlin Spencer and Charles Wesley Birtwell, eds. The Care of Dependent, Neglected, and Wayward Children (Baltimore, 1894), 131-2

84 Chester S. Vernier, American Family Law 4:1920, 64-65; Tiffin, In Whose Best Interests, 146-7. 58

85 Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 76

86 Riis cited in Antler and Antler, "The Child Protective Movement," 177-78

87 John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children, (New York, 1906, reprinted 1968).