"Saving Our Kids: Child Protection in America" Michael Grossberg, Indiana University [Draft – Not for Attribution Without Consent of the Author]
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
"Saving Our Kids: Child 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 nightmare 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 New York City poor relief officials. The officials then placed the eighteen-month-old infant 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 Cruelty to Animals to investigate. SPCA President Henry Bergh 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 United States 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 juvenile delinquency, parentless children roaming the streets of American cities, and on and on. Particularly troubling to many old stock Americans was the family diversity 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.