A Regional Study of Secular and Sectarian Orphanages and Their Response to Progressive Era Child-Saving Reforms, 1880-1930

Home , Attendorn, Charles Loring Brace, Chatfield College, Daniel Rudd, Jacob Rader Marcus, Johnny Gruelle

Closer Connections: A Regional Study of Secular and Sectarian Orphanages and Their Response to Progressive Era Child-Saving Reforms, 1880-1930

A dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School

of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

In the Department of History

of the College of Arts and Sciences

Debra K. Burgess

B.A. University of Cincinnati

June 2012

M.A. University of Cincinnati

April 2014

Committee Chair: Mark A. Raider, Ph.D.

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Abstract

Closer Connections: A Regional Study of Secular and Sectarian Orphanages and Their Response to Progressive Era Child-Saving Reforms, 1880-1930

Debra K. Burgess

Child welfare programs in the United States have their foundation in the religious traditions brought to the country up through the late nineteenth century by immigrants from many European nations. These programs were sometimes managed within the auspices of organized religious institutions but were also found among the ad hoc efforts of religiously- motivated individuals. This study analyzes how the religious traditions of Catholicism, Judaism, and Protestantism established and maintained institutions of all sizes along the lines of faith- based dogma and their relationship to American cultural influences in the Midwest cities of

Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh during the period of 1880-1930. These influences included: the close ties between (or constructive indifference exhibited by) the secular and sectarian stakeholders involved in child-welfare efforts, the daily needs of children of immigrants orphaned by parental disease, death, or desertion, and the rising influence of social welfare professionals and proponents of the foster care system.

This study incorporates material from the archives of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, the Cincinnati Historical Society, the Western Reserve Historical

Society in Cleveland, and the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society in Pittsburgh. The records of Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant orphanages in Cincinnati (the German Protestant Orphan

Home, St. Aloysius, St. Joseph’s, and the Orthodox Jewish Orphan Home), Cleveland (the Jones

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Home and School for Friendless Children and the Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, St.

Joseph’s Orphanage, St. Vincent’s Orphanage, Home of the Holy Family, and the Jewish Orphan

Asylum) and in Pittsburgh (the J. M. Gusky Home for Hebrew Children, the Protestant Orphan

Asylum, St. Paul’s Orphanage, and the Home of the Holy Family). In addition, diocesan records of Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh offered material in connection with Catholic Church directives on the guardianship and education of orphaned and abandoned children. Parochial and religious education records for Catholic and Jewish children who lived in these institutions shed additional light on several aspects of their daily lives. Newspaper reports on fundraising efforts undertaken on behalf of these institutions and their charges were also useful, along with reports issued by various auxiliary institutional support groups.

These original archival research efforts have been analyzed in the context of previous work by gifted scholars in the fields of Immigration, Social History, Child Welfare, and

American Religious History that examine pieces of the puzzle this study seeks to solve. The efforts of religious individuals directed at the care of vulnerable children within their communities were originally mounted as an alternative to secular child welfare programs. Over time, these efforts would have to adapt to changes within the American social landscape that diminished the role of faith.

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Closer Connections: A Regional Study of Secular and Sectarian Orphanages and Their Response to Progressive Era Child-Saving Reforms, 1880-1930

Debra K. Burgess

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Acknowledgements

One of the best parts of being a historian is the opportunity to transform into Lewis

Carroll’s heroine and follow little waist-coated rabbits down mysterious holes. At times, you risk getting trapped in an endless tunnel of one clue following another, and another, and another, without ever reaching a satisfying conclusion. Yet, at other times, you are able to weave the tiny threads of information left behind by our friend the rabbit together into something meaningful.

That has been my experience with the topic of sectarian child saving in nineteenth century

America and how it was transformed by Progressive Era reforms.

I would first like to thank members of my committee, Dr. Yaakov Ariel, Dr. Maura

O’Connor, Dr. David Stradling, and Dr. Mark A. Raider. I am grateful to Dr. Yaakov Ariel, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who agreed early on to be part of my dissertation committee. His insights into the relationships among different religions at important turning points in the American experience have been invaluable. Dr. Maura O’Connor of the

University of Cincinnati is an amazing role model as a scholar, author, and educator. I am grateful for her willingness to be a part of my committee. I would also like to thank Dr. David

Stradling of the University of Cincinnati who has been an honest, and thoughtful, contributor to my growth as a student and historian. His ability to guide, without micromanaging, the development of this study has helped me strive to do my best work. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Dr. Mark A. Raider of the University of Cincinnati to my work and evolution as a scholar. Without his consistent support, encouragement, and mentoring, I would never have arrived at the point where I am able to defend a work in which I am invested so deeply. Abraham Lincoln said, “I am a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I did not have the heart to let him down.” Dr. Raider is that friend. There have been

24:11 several professors in my undergraduate and graduate career who have inspired and encouraged me to pursue this dream. I would not be at the threshold of this achievement without mentors like

Dr. Raider and Dr. Sigrun Haude whose encouragement allowed me to press forward with this project, even when I was unsure of my contributions.

I would also like to acknowledge the time and assistance of the archivists, librarians, curators, and historians who aided me in my research. Sara L. Ater of the Cincinnati

Archdiocesan Archives, Dr. Gary P. Zola (Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion), executive director of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, and the

AJA staff especially Dr. Dana Herman, Elisa Ho and Kevin Proffitt, David Schlitt of the Rauh

Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center, Christine Engels and the research librarians at the

Cincinnati Historical Society Library and Archives, the Sisters of Notre Dame, the Cleveland and Pittsburgh Diocesan Archives, and members of the Herschede family who allowed me access to family papers and photographs. And, I would like to thank my doctoral program colleagues, Angela Stiefbold, Kristen Fleming, Bela Kashyap, Evan Johnson, Maurice Adkins,

Peter Niehoff, and Anne Delano Steinert, who have helped me keep my sanity, and dear family friends, Franklin Foster and Shannon Whitaker, who agreed to read an early draft of this dissertation, their generous friendship has been a gift.

Adoption is a part of my life experience. It has helped me to understand that giving up a child to be raised by others can often be a selfless act of the highest form of love. My Mother was adopted by my grandparents when she was just two weeks old. Twenty-one years later, as a struggling young mother, abandoned by her husband, with two small children of her own, she would likely have had to place my brother and I up for adoption, had it not been for my grandparents. When she remarried a few years later, my brother Michael and I were adopted by

24:11 her second husband, our Dad. I am also a wife and a mother; part of a blended family that includes both biological and bonus children. My husband and I each had two children from first marriages and together we added our fifth. Two of our children were adopted as newborns through Catholic Family Services and so our family is one that is not defined solely by genetics.

All of these experiences have informed who I am and how I have approached this dissertation topic. My husband, Doug, and our children, Christopher, Brian, Kevin, Brittany, and Matthew, our daughters-in-law Stephanie and Melanie, and grandchildren, Lilly, Kurtis, and Juniper have been my cheerleaders on the long road of pursuing my doctorate. Their love and support have been the inspiration that have allowed me to finish this dissertation.

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With Love and Gratitude for Doug, and Our Children

Christopher, Brian, Kevin, Brittany, and Matthew

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Table of Contents

Introduction ,,….…………………………………………………………….………….……… 1

Chapter 1 – Class, Ethnicity, and Faith: Factors in Shaping Communal Responses to Midwest Progressivism …………………………………………………………………….……. 17

Chapter 2 – Disrupting the Status Quo or Introducing Order?: Bosses, Progressives, Social Gospelers, and the New Philanthropy….…………………………………...…………. 60

Chapter 3 – Public Child Welfare and Protestant Charity ..………………..……….………… 92

Chapter 4 – A Light of Renewal: Nineteenth-Century Catholic Charity …………………….. 136

Chapter 5 – Diaspora in Retrograde: The Jewish Community’s Regional Response ……….. 202

Chapter 6 – Fostering Change: Adopting Progressive Era Child Welfare Reforms ………… 269

Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………... 344

Bibliography ..……………………………………………………………………………….. 363

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Tables

Table 1 – Jewish Populations …………………………………………………………………… 33

Table 2 – The Children Released to Frank and Sadie Herschede from the St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum – 1894-1924 ……………………………………………………………. 167

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Illustrations and Images

Fig. 1 - “The Wisdom of the West,” Cover, Punch, or the London Charivari, May 4, 1910.

Fig. 2 – “‘Map of the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne & Chicago and Cleveland and Pittsburg, Grand Rapids and Indiana, and Pennsylvania Railroads’ (1874), Rand McNally and Co.”

Fig. 3 – “Henry Warren, ‘Pittsburgh from an Island in the Allegheny River,’ ca. 1800.”

Fig. 4 – “‘Journey to the Slaughterhouse,’ Harper’s Weekly, Feb. 4, 1860, 72.”

Fig. 5 – “‘Map of Cincinnati and Suburbs: Covington and Newport,’ ca. 1870. M. &. R. Burgheim.”

Fig. 6 - “City of Cleveland Ethnic Settlements, ca. 1923,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

Fig. 7 – “John Fergus O’Hea, ‘The Professor,’ Evening Telegraph (Dublin, Ireland), ca. 1912.”

Fig. 8 - “City Workhouse/City Infirmary at Cooley Farms 1871-1912, photo ca. 1880s.”

Fig. 9 - “Beech Brook, Pepper Pike – Tudor-Style Cottages, ca. 1950s.”

Fig. 10 – “Life Membership and Cash Subscriptions 1888.”

Fig. 11 – “In-Kind Donations first Day 1887.”

Fig. 12 – “Record of Old Admissions: Dec. 1885 – Jun. 1915.”

Fig. 13 - “(German) General Protestant Orphan Home, Mt. Auburn, Cincinnati, ca. 1850.”

Fig. 14 – “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio, 1891, 4, 111.”

Fig. 15 – “Slave to a Baneful Drug. Cincinnati Enquirer, Nov. 15, 1899, 12.”

Fig. 16 – Crimes of Preachers of the United States and Canada, Cover.

Fig. 17 - “Allegheny County Workhouse, n.d.”

Fig. 18 – “St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, Bond Hill, ca. 1886.”

Fig. 19 – “The Orphans of St. Aloysius, ca. 1896.”

Fig. 20 – “Schedule of Months, and List of Places, Assigned for Collections, to Each of the Charitable Institutions of Cleveland.”

Fig. 21 – “St. Paul’s R. C. Orphan Asylum: Crafton Station, Pittsburgh, Pa.”

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Fig. 22 – “Isaac Mayer Wise, 1880.”

Fig. 23 – “Max Lilienthal, n.d.”

Fig. 24 – “Julius Freiberg and Levi Workum, ca. 1850s.”

Fig. 25 – “Freiberg & Workum – Trade Advertisement, ca. 1870.”

Fig. 26 – “Duffie Workum Freiberg, n.d.”

Fig. 27 – “Jewish Foster Home, ca. 1910.”

Fig. 28 – “Manischewitz Matzos, ca. 1900.”

Fig. 29 – “(Orthodox) Jewish Home and Hospital Buildings, n.d.”

Fig. 30 – “Ferdinand Westheimer & Sons, Distillers (Letterhead), ca. 1904.”

Fig. 31 – “Jewish Orphan Asylum, ca. 1900.”

Fig. 32 – “Bellefaire Jewish Children’s Bureau, ca. 1929.”

Fig. 33 – “Gusky’s – Advertisement, 1891.”

Fig. 34 – “Fifth Grand Annual Tour of the Orphan Homes of Pittsburgh and Allegheny, Pittsburg Daily Post, Dec. 16, 1886.”

Fig. 35 – “J. M. Gusky: Merchant and Philanthropist, 1845-1886 – Bronze Plaque, n.d.”

Fig. 36 – “Gusky’s Orphanage and Home and Bertha Rauh Cohen Memorial, c. 1910.”

Fig. 37 – “Udo J. Keppler, ‘The Bigger Stick,’ Cover, Puck, July 17, 1907.”

Fig. 38 – “Elizabeth Nourse, Meditations (Sous Les Arbres), 1902.”

Fig. 39 – “Elizabeth Nourse, Une Mere, 1888.”

Fig. 40 – “The Delineator – Cover, Oct. 1907.”

Fig. 41 – “‘Ivory Soap … 99 44/100 Per Cent Pure,’ Proctor & Gamble Advertisement, The Delineator, Feb. 1907.”

Fig. 42 – “Alfred Cheney Johnston, ‘Muriel Finlay,’ ca. 1920.”

Fig. 43 – “Charles Dana Gibson, The Rendezvous, ca. 1912.”

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Fig. 44 – “Charles Dana Gibson, No Time for Politics, ca. 1912.”

Fig. 45 – “The Way from Ellis Island Leads Right Across the City to Third Avenue.”

Fig. 46 – “‘You Sent for Me.’ He Said.”

Fig. 47 – “Jas. E. West, ca. 1910.”

Fig. 48 – “Official Conference Photo – Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, Jan. 25- 26, 1909.”

Fig. 49 – “The Delineator – Cover, Nov. 1908.”

Fig. 50 – “The Delineator – Cover, Jan. 1909.”

Fig. 51 – “‘National Child Rescue League,’ The Delineator, Jan. 1909.”

Fig. 52 – “Johnny Gruelle, ‘Orphant Annie,’ 1921.”

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Introduction

“Further, all men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you ....”

– Augustine, Bishop of Hippo1

This study represents an effort to understand the experiences of religious minority communities in their response to the crises of orphaned children in three midwestern cities in the years from

1880 to 1930. I will compare the experiences of individuals and organizations tied to Jewish and

Catholic child-saving facilities to those who were involved with the Protestant institutions that had historically amicable relationships with politicians and bureaucrats whose support was both financial and administrative. During these decades, more than one hundred institutions in the aggregate operated in Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and served tens of thousands of children who had lost one or both parents to divorce, disease, death, or desertion.

My principal objective in this study is to follow the communal networks, stabilities, and instabilities among the patterns of immigration, assimilation, and social welfare outreach within

Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant communities in these cities, each of which emerged as a dynamic, thriving, and distinctive urban center at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This examination reveals how the exclusivity within these populations often led to the isolation of disadvantaged children, further distancing them from integration into the larger community, and impacting the social cohesiveness of the cities themselves for a generation or more. A secondary objective is to examine the context in which the adults responsible for the

1 Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine, Chapter 29 (n.p.) published online by Georgetown University, http://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/augustine/ddc1.html. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, later St. Augustine, was a fifth century C.E. theologian and church father who wrote extensively on matters of the Christian faith and church doctrine.

24:11 care of these children became involved in the child-saving movement and how their efforts were comparable to one another, or significantly different.

Following this Introduction, Chapter 1 offers a brief discussion on the historical social and cultural contexts of the settlement of the three case study locations and how the differences in their immigrant communities’ ethnic and religious makeup shaped community responses to

Progressive reforms. Chapter 2 explores the complicated relationship among the Progressive movement participants, adherents of the Social Gospel, and those who became believers in the power of social science, including Social Darwinism, to advance the cause of seeking justice for social issues. The narrative and analysis will then diverge along three tracks. Chapter 3 assesses public facilities and Protestant-run child welfare institutions that served the needs of non-

Catholic, Christian children. Chapter 4 considers the role of Roman Catholics both within and outside the auspices of the official Church to care for immigrant and native-born Catholic children. Chapter 5 examines the Jewish community’s regional approach to caring for orphaned

Jewish children, relocating these orphans from geographic areas where they were isolated in small populations, to centrally located institutions. Finally, Chapter 6 draws the analyses of these earlier chapters together into conversation with the dominant trajectory of child welfare reform.

This analysis plays out against the backdrop of the competing images imbedded in the idealization of traditional womanhood in fine art and popular media against the emergence of the

New Woman as an agent of change. This phenomenon coincided with efforts during the

Progressive Era to professionalize, and secularize, social work, and was publicized in the pages of women’s issue magazines and debated in the influence centers of the nation’s capital.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a marked increase in the number of organizations that endeavored to cure the many social and cultural ills that plagued

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American society. Reformers demanded new solutions for the era’s most pressing problems

including poverty, child labor, the denial of woman suffrage, and alcohol abuse. American social

history boasts a broad and deep historiography of the intellectual movements that fostered increased governmental intervention and the celebrated reform crusades. When analysis turns to the welfare of abandoned and neglected children, however, a significant slice of the secondary

literature is focused on Progressive Era outplacements of children through the so-called orphan

train movement in which children literally boarded passenger trains for new lives on farms in the

Midwest and Great Plains.

Most of these children thus relocated from the immigrant-swollen eastern seaboard were

almost always destined to become agricultural workers in the Midwest and Great Plains. From a

logistical standpoint, the program was a success, but their outcomes were potentially fraught

with abuse or exploitation. Little of the extant scholarship is concerned with inquiry into the

efforts of individuals on behalf of orphaned children based in their religious beliefs. Progressive

Era reforms represented a sea change in transatlantic political efforts to manage social and

cultural change. The impact of many Progressive Era institutions has been documented in the

scholarship of the Progressive Era but few scholars have investigated the impact of progressive

reforms on children and existing child welfare efforts.

Much of the existing scholarship concentrates on the secular and charitable responses to

the needs of orphaned children in coastal port cities. Historians have looked extensively at the

origins of private and parochial child welfare in New York City, New York, New Orleans,

Louisiana, and Baltimore, Maryland as well as Charleston, South Carolina.2 Although Cleveland

2 John E. Murray, The Charleston Orphan House: Children’s Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Edward Rohs and Judith Estrine, Raised by the Church: Growing up in New York City’s Catholic Orphanages (Empire State Editions of Fordham University Press, 2011). 3

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fares somewhat better in the historical record, far less has been written about the child welfare

efforts in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh during the period of this study.3 In addition, absent from the

existing scholarship is a substantive examination of the individual lay religious response to the

obvious crisis of dependent children.

When, in 2015, I was conducting unrelated research in the Cincinnati Historical Society

Library Archives at Cincinnati Museum Center, I came across a then-unprocessed collection of

files from the St. Aloysius Orphanage. It soon occurred to me, that among the admission and

dismissal records, the files on children dismissed to wage homes seemed to offer the possibility

of exploring how such children from a midwestern orphanage were outplaced, compared to those

sent West by the thousands on the orphan trains. Reading through the records, an unexpected

pattern emerged. There were issues at stake more significant than just a single child or small

number of children from a Catholic orphanage released to work for a Catholic businessman and

his wife. Members of the laity were deeply involved in the lives of orphaned children within

their community, on individual and organizational levels. What began as research for a scholarly

essay developed into a research program that warranted a dissertation-length treatment.

At its core, my study is grounded in American social history in conversation with

political, religious, and immigration scholarship. In the Social Gospel movement, liberal

Christian principles, specifically those of Protestant Christianity, found various outlets for social

reform impulses, including child welfare. This movement begat well-known institutions such as

the New York City Children’s Aid Society and programs such as the orphan train movement.

3 M. Christine Anderson and Nancy Bertaux, “Poor Men but Hard-Working Fathers: The Cincinnati Orphan Asylum and Parental Roles in the Nineteenth Century Working Class,” Ohio History, 111 (Summer 2002), 145-82; Jessie B. Ramey, “‘I Dream of Them Almost Every Night’ Working-Class Fathers and Orphanages in Pittsburgh, 1878-1929,” Journal of Family History, 37: 2 (Spring 2011), 36- 54; and Ramey, Child Care in Black and White: Working Parents and the History of Orphanages (University of Illinois Press, 2012). 4

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Yet, these crusades were often disinterested in, or at best, ambivalent about the possibility of

implementing child welfare reforms among immigrant populations, especially if the latter were

either Catholic or Jewish immigrants. Initial advocates of the Progressive Era’s child-saving movement “had a strong Protestant bias” and whether their altruism was mitigated by anti-

Catholic and antisemitic sentiment is a facet of my inquiry.4 Despite the underlying social,

religious, and cultural resistance to immigrants, there were individuals who were able to put such

biases aside to help the most vulnerable among them, the children.

I propose that when individuals intervened on behalf of children, they were often animated by very personal expressions of traditional faith. They may not have been Progressive social reformers in the vein of Florence Kelley, Jane Addams, or even orphan train founder

Charles Loring Brace, however, their outreach to children reflected an individual commitment to impact lives through direct action rather than through participation in a larger social movement.

The Herschedes of Cincinnati, for example, were self-made members of the city’s upper-middle class as were the Guskys in Pittsburgh, in addition to the successful Jewish professionals and businessmen who founded Cleveland’s Jewish Orphan Asylum such as Benjamin Franklin

Peixotto. These were individuals and families who were missionaries, not necessarily for their creed, but for their spiritual inheritance, deeply felt and meant to be shared with those less fortunate. This study seeks to examine the shared the commitment of these individuals and families and explore the relative impact of their religiously based efforts in comparison to the

Social Gospel adherents of the larger Progressive movement.5

4 Ronald D. Cohen, “Child Saving and Progressivism, 1885-1915,” in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, ed. Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Greenwood Press, 1985). 5 The scholarship here is plentiful, especially regarding the notables among the Social Gospel movement as they were active on the ground including: Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, and Josiah Strong and social welfare advocates such Lillian Wald, Jane Addams, Frances Willard, Florence Kelley, and Margaret Sanger. See Cybelle Fox’s Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American 5

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Studying the response of faith-affiliated child-saving organizations and the efforts of individuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not only expands our understanding of the conflict among traditional religious belief systems and the secular-leaning efforts of the newly-influential professional class, it also reveals when synergies of effort were capitalized upon, or missed entirely. The Herschedes, Guskys, Freibergs and others who will be examined in the study were certainly exemplars of Catholic and Jewish lay piety and their stories often run counter to the prevailing historic assessment of the Social Gospel movement as the near-exclusive Protestant vehicle within Progressive Era reforms. The idea that deep and lasting relationships existed among these families and their faiths, and those with responsibility for the day-to-day care and education of the children within the confines of orphanages, is likely to have been replicated in other parts of the country and represent more than just a regional trend.

Other studies have intervened in the historical record with regard to orphans and child welfare through the lens of religion such as Reena Siegman Friedman’s These Are Our Children:

Jewish Orphanages in the United States, 1880-1925 (1994), which assesses the strength of a

Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Princeton University Press, 2012); Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Historical Foundations of Women’s Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 1830-1930,” in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (Routledge, 1993); and Harold Wilensky and Charles Lebeaux’s Industrial Society and Social Welfare (Russell Sage Foundation, 1958). There is also significant work that looks at the orphan train movement from the institutional as well as orphan perspective including: Megan Birk, “Supply and Demand: The Mutual Dependency of Children’s Institutions and the American Farmer,” Agricultural History, 86, 1 (Winter 2012), 86-103; Carolyn Moehling, “Broken Homes: The ‘Missing’ Children of the 1910 Census, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 33:2 (Oct. 2002), 205-33; Lori Askeland, Children and Youth in Adoption: Orphanages and Foster Care: A Historical Guide and Handbook (Greenwood Press, 2006); Birk, Fostering on the Farm: Child Placement in the Rural Midwest (University of Illinois Press, 2015); Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Harvard University Press, 1997); Matthew A. Crenson, Building the Invisible Orphanage: A Pre-History of the American Welfare System (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Judith A. Dulberger, Mother Donit Fore the Best: Correspondence of a Nineteenth-Century Orphan Asylum (Syracuse University Press, 1996); Timothy A. Hacsi, Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Harvard University Press, 1997); and Marilyn Irvin Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (University of Nebraska Press, 1992). 6

24:11 community by looking at its institutions including orphanages, and Gary Polster’s Inside Looking

Out: The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, 1868-1924 (1994), a personal look at the Cleveland

Reform Judaism orphan asylum.6 Edward Rohs’ and Judith Estrine’s Raised by the Church:

Growing Up in New York City’s Catholic Orphanages (2012), a memoir of Rohs’ childhood in the Catholic orphanages of the nation’s largest city and Dorothy M. Brown’s and Elizabeth

McKeown’s The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (2000), an examination of efforts of Catholic religious to care for Catholic families and Catholic orphans, while resisting Protestant and government intrusions at the local level are also important contributions to the historiography.7 Other studies have approached American child welfare through the lens of race, such as Jessie B. Ramey’s Child Care in Black and White: Working

Parents and the History of Orphanages (2012) which examines the differences between an orphanage for African American children and one for white children, both in Pittsburgh, founded by the same female philanthropist.8 Each of these studies has provided insight into life in specific orphanages, or compared the operations of two orphanages in a single city and mapped those results onto the national snapshot of orphan care, but none have taken a regional approach used in this study and applied it to the examination of child care and how those efforts were impacted by Progressive-era reforms.

The discussion of the secondary literature for this study necessarily includes those that unpack the political and social reform climates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, generally recognized as the “Progressive Era,” especially regarding the creation of

6 Reena Sieman Friedman, These Are Our Children: Jewish Orphanages in the United States, 1880-1925 (Brandeis University Press, 1994) and Gary Polster, Inside Looking Out: The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, 1868-1924 (Kent State University Press, 1994). 7 Rohs and Estrine, Raised by the Church; and Brown and McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us. 8 Ramey, Child Care in Black and White. 7

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social welfare programs meant to improve the lives of the poor and disadvantaged. I have also

reviewed scholarship that deals with the changing nature of institutions such as orphanages and

asylums and their services to parentless or at-risk children into the twentieth century.9 The historiography of the American political scene of the Progressive Era is rich and complex.

Generally, however, there are two tracks within this field: the first follows the more traditional path of scholars such as Robert H. Wiebe, Herbert Gutman, Paul Boyer, and Richard Hofstadter.

During the Progressive Era, Americans looked for pillars around which to construct a new social order for the modern world; one that kept the negative aspects of the nation as a muscular industrial capitalist society in check.10 These authors rely on top-down analysis of the records

and action of those with political power to shape an American bureaucracy that led the nation in

the direction of the people’s own good. This is certainly a valuable approach, but more recent

scholarship has also considered the perspectives of those Americans from the professional and

working classes; how their business and voluntary associations had at least as much to do with

setting the stage for social reform movements as did governmental intervention. Among the

historians in this movement to expand the Progressive Era historiography are Michael McGerr,

William Leach, Nell Painter, Rebecca Edwards, and Ray Ginger.11

9 There are several ways to approach a study of religiously-centered care of orphans and abandoned children in ethnic communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The similarities and differences among the various constituencies regarding the care of these children have their basis in the tenets and traditions of faith that were brought to the United States by European immigrants. I have intentionally chosen, therefore, to provide historical context of the concept of childhood and the deep historic religious roots of orphan care as an integral part of the larger charitable efforts of the faithful, as both impacted the conscious and unconscious attitudes of religious communities toward orphaned children. The care of orphans has a deep historic track and discussing its transformation in the early twentieth century is not as fulsome without a discussion of its origins. 10 Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America (Harvard University Press, 1978); Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (Knopf, 1977); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (Prentice-Hall, 1963); and Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (Hill and Wang, 1967). 11 Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905 (Oxford University Press, 2005); Ray Ginger, Age of Excess: The United States, 1877-1914 (Waveland Press, 1989); William Leach, Land of 8

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A third area of scholarship that informs this study emphasizes the impact of individuals on

the front lines of child welfare institutions, those eleemosynary organizations charged with providing

food, shelter, clothing, education, and even moral instruction to children left to their own devices, or

to the kindness of strangers, by parents unable or unwilling to care for them. There is remarkably

little scholarship that deals with children placed by orphanages or other child welfare institutions

into industrial employment settings during the Progressive Era. What little scholarship exists in this

regard focuses other aspects of the lives of these children including discrete episodes or historical

trends present in distinct locations including Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Cincinnati.12 These studies of limited scope dealt with: widowed fathers who tried to maintain their parental rights even as they had to place their children in orphanages, at least until the time they remarried; with mothers who had to leave their children with orphanages rather than let them starve after the death or desertion of their father; and with small-town farmers who looked to the local archdiocese to supply young farmhands—children released as indentures to the farmer with minimal diocesan oversight. The balance of this tranche of the secondary literature stresses larger issues of abandoned and orphaned children, the upsides as well as the pitfalls of their institutionalization, and their outplacement to mostly Midwestern and Great Plains farms through the orphan train system.13

The stories of unfortunate children abandoned by parents out of necessity or neglect, and society’s efforts of varying intensity and success to protect and foster these children until they grew into adulthood, are timeless. From antiquity to the present day, such children have been left

Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (Random House, 1993); Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (Oxford University Press, 2005); and Nell I. Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (W. W. Norton, 2013). 12 See note 5 above. 13 Ibid. 9

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to find their own way in the world—often with tragic consequences.14 In some instances, they

may have been cared for by grandparents, siblings, or extended family members. Or,

fortuitously, they happened upon salvation through the kindness of strangers in the guise of

public officials and private individuals or organizations. One aspect of this study then is how

religious faith and traditions, motivated by the concept of aliena misericordia (the kindness of

strangers) played a pivotal role in the evolving societal attitudes toward orphans and abandoned

children.15 Against this backdrop, my study addresses a core problem of the Progressive Era’s

historical scholarship, namely what illuminates the differences, as well as the similarities, among

various ethnic religious communities in the United States, in their treatment of orphaned and

abandoned children?

The answer to the question, at least in part, is that the transmission of these ideas from

European motherlands to a new home in the United States was achieved through cultural

traditions carried forward from historic homeland to new homes as they were interpreted by

immigrants within the parameters of the American experiment. Among those traditions are those

among the religiously devout regarding the care of orphaned and abandoned children. The early

modern era’s Waisenhaus (orphanage) movement, born in the German lands of central Europe,

which promoted the idea of caring for children in centralized institutional settings with a

pedagogical mission, is one such cultural tradition. August Hermann Francke, a university

professor and Lutheran pastor at St. Georgen Kirche in Halle (the largest city in the German state

14 Orphaned and abandoned children in developed and developing nations are more often at risk of contact with and exploitation by human traffickers and life on mean streets. As important a story as that is to tell, it is not one that can be explored fully within the confines of this study. 15 Author John Boswell interpreted the phrase aliena misericordia “used in a number of Latin legal, ecclesiastical, and literary texts … into idiomatic English the kindness of strangers [to mean those] who found and reared children” not their own. John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1988), 5. 10

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of Saxony-Anhalt) is credited with the developing the concept of Waisenhaus. The Halle

Waisenhaus began as a school for deprived and orphaned children and found a royal patron in

the King of Prussia who gave Francke funds to build an orphanage.16 From this auspicious

beginning, the Francke Foundations of Halle spread its mission of charitable works tied to faith

and learning. Among ideas brought to the United States were those of Halle Pietism, a Lutheran

sect that combined Biblical doctrine and Reform ideas about individual piety and living a

vigorous Christian life that originated with Philipp Jakob Spener, who emphasized personal transformation through spiritual birth and renewal. Many of these ideas were brought to the

United States by the Moravians who immigrated throughout the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.17 Moravians were important backers of Rev. George Whitefield, so critical

to the American Great Awakening. Whitefield is also credited with bringing the Waisenhaus idea

to Savannah, Georgia with the foundation of the Bethesda orphanage of Savannah, Georgia

modeled on the Francke Federation Halle Waisenhaus.18 In their day, historian Juliane Jacobi

contends, these institutions were bastions of modernity and models for breaking cycles of

poverty and neglect.19

Orphans and abandoned children were present from the earliest days of European

colonization in North America. When the population was small, these children were often taken

16 Richard L. Gawthorp, Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 171-73; and Peter Kivisto, Religion and Immigration: Migrant Faiths in North America and Western Europe (Polity, 2014), 109. 17 Spener’s godson, Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, offered to let a group of Spener’s Pietist followers from Austria settle on one of his estates in Moravia. The group retained the identifier “Moravian” when they immigrated to the United States. Peter Hoover, Behold the Lamb: The History, Life, and Dream of the Moravian Church (Radical Reformation Books, 2007). 18 Thomas S. Kidd, Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (Yale University Press, 2014). 19 Foundling hospitals were established in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire during the Early Modern era, as were orphanages run by the church or local civil authorities. Juliane Jacobi, “Between Charity and Education: Orphans and Orphanages in Early Modern Times,” Paedogogica Historica, 45:1- 2, 2009, 66. 11

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in by extended family members or by neighbors. In those cases, resolution reflected a loving

commitment to a needy child, or, as likely, an indenture of the child until he or she reached the

age of manumission. Unfortunately, however, even very young children were subject to being

taken advantage of, working long, hard hours in exchange for meager room and board, subject to

harsh treatment and abuse. This began to change in the mid-eighteenth century when colonial

Virginia legislators passed laws that protected orphans. Such laws included a requirement for

annual court hearings at the county level to examine the health and well-being of orphaned children at the hands of their guardians.20

Orphanages began to appear in large eastern cities around the turn of the nineteenth century. The first private (and Protestant) institution was founded in New York City in 1806 through the efforts of Alexander Hamilton’s widow, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton and a friend.21

The first Catholic orphanage in New York City was founded by the Sisters of Charity in 1817.22

The Charleston Orphan House, the first publicly-funded orphanage in America, was founded in

1790 in response to a public cry to provide for children who had lost parents during a particularly devastating yellow fever epidemic. Previously, Charleston’s St. Philip Anglican Church had taken charge of finding willing parishioners to foster orphaned and abandoned children, but with

the 1790 outbreak of yellow fever, the need became too great.23 The Orphan House was

supported by wealthy citizens and by those “artisans and merchants (who) relied on its charges

as apprentices,” and, according to historian John Murray, “in assuring poor whites of elite

20 Interview with Cathy Hellier, “Orphans of Williamsburg” by Harmony Hunter, Jan. 13, 2014. Podcast audio. http://mediablubrry.com/colonial_williamsburg/p/podcast.history.org/feed/audio. 21 Tilar J. Mazzeo, Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton (Gallery Books, 2018). 22 Margaret M. McGuinness, Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in America (New York University Press, 2013). 23 Murray, The Charleston Orphan House. 12

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concern for their children, the Orphan House served a political function as important as its social

welfare function. It did more than merely process vulnerable children.”24

Early efforts on behalf of orphaned children were often driven by a requirement under the

English poor laws (applicable at the time in the American colonies) that orphans and abandoned

children were the responsibility of the village, or more likely, the local parish of the Anglican

church.25 There were few institutions for orphan care, per se, until the population increases of the

nineteenth century and the corresponding increase in orphaned children began to overwhelm the

ad hoc system. In addition, a cultural shift away from the idea of children as small adults, and

toward childhood as being a state of vulnerability, therefore deserving of reverence and

protection, spurred the development of orphan asylums. As the population of the United States

began to push west of the Allegheny Mountains, increasing as it spread, the need for

communities to deal with these dependent children became more critical.

Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh are representative of the critical demographic and

environmental elements found in many mid- and large-sized metropolitan areas of the United

States at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like the Atlantic coast port cities,

which to date have received the lion’s share of scholarly attention, these cities possessed vibrant

European-immigrant communities and experienced with both the negative and positive attributes

of industrialization and the resulting challenges of rapid urban growth. Yet the time between

major settlement activity and industrialization was compressed into a few short decades rather

than a century or more as it was in established cities of the Atlantic seaboard, and social issues

were negatively impacted by the resulting dynamic pace of change. These case studies are ripe

24 Ibid., 3. 25 Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850-1890 (Twayne, 1997). 13

24:11 for comparison of the responses of traditional religions and their followers to the crisis of orphaned children.

Each of these cities was founded in the closing decade of the eighteenth century along the banks of a major inland waterway: Cincinnati on the banks of the Ohio River, Cleveland along the shoreline of Lake Erie, and Pittsburgh at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela

Rivers. They experienced rapid geographic expansion and explosive population growth in the nineteenth century and became hubs of industrial economic activity and transportation. They were magnets for European immigration whose populations included Catholics, Jews, and

Protestants, and they all had experience with vibro cholerae, cholera, a highly contagious bacteria contracted through drinking unfiltered water or ingesting contaminated food.

Nineteenth-century Asiatic cholera was virulent and lethal with no known cure. It brought on severe diarrhea, vomiting, and fatal dehydration. Cholera pandemics impacted populations around the world over much of the early nineteenth century, and the bacteria made its way to the

United States around 1830. It reached each of Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the early

1830s and again during the late 1840s dealing a second deadly blow. These cities acquired communal coping skills through repeated experience dealing with calamities that were connected to rapid urbanization including pollution, overcrowding, epidemic disease, and dissolution of the family unit as a result of death, poverty, or abandonment.26 What made the early Midwest different: challenging topography, rudimentary infrastructure, and non-existent sanitation, also made it vulnerable.

Deploying a thematic and chronologic methodological approach, this study compares the profiles-in-the-making of Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, and pays especially close

26 Charles R. Morris, The Dawn of Innovation: America’s First Industrial Revolution (PublicAffairs, 2014). 14

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attention to four interrelated motifs: local government cooperation with (and financial support

for) Protestant-run child welfare institutions, the importance of the idea of “good works” to

Catholics who sought to serve Catholic orphans and protect them from Protestant missionizing, the desire of Jews to assimilate into American society without losing their Jewishness or their orphans to Christian proselytization, and the impact of Progressive reforms in child welfare programming on sectarian institutions. The history of the lay religious response to the crisis of orphaned and abandoned children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is critical to

understanding the rise of urban America at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as

well as the expansive and capacious nature of Progressive Era efforts to meet the needs of

society’s least fortunate and most vulnerable members, its orphaned and abandoned children.

This phenomenon illustrates the perspective of those who undertook volunteer charitable

roles with the institutions that provided for the day-to-day welfare of children, as well as their

educational and vocational training needs. These individuals were often motivated by deeply

held Catholic or Jewish spiritual tenets in combination with a this-worldly approach to child

saving and Progressive-era reforms undergirded by the principles of Protestant Christianity. The

cultural dynamic of the urban Midwest and its relationship to immigration, industrialization, and

individualism made the community response to the needs of these children in Cincinnati,

Cleveland, and Pittsburgh more of a personal mission than in the cities of the Atlantic coast so

often the subject of studies of nineteenth and twentieth century orphanages.

This is not a complete history of institutional child-saving in any of these cities during the

Progressive Era but rather a consideration of the environment in which orphans and the adults

who endeavored to care for them operated and matured. The historical record for civic and

sectarian support for institutions that provided for the welfare of orphaned children in these cities

24:11 varies in depth and breadth. Files from some of the institutions are remarkably descriptive and well-documented, preserved in the archives of historical society libraries. Others maintained adequate records of internal governance such as minutes of trustee meetings, but precious little on the programs, caretakers, or children themselves. Some institutions have no extant records at all, and what is discoverable is limited to the information in city directories and United States

Census reports. Nevertheless, the investigation of Midwestern institutions fills a gap in the literature, that has previously been limited to comparisons of institutions within a single city, not regionally, and not using religious affiliations as a lens for historic analysis. A targeted study of these cities’ responses to the crises of dependent children unlocks how these institutions became a critical part of the child-saving movement whether they were advancing the Progressive worldview, or resisting it. The absence of personal records limits the detail in which it is possible to document some aspects of the lives of those among the orphan population within an institution and my analysis will necessarily draw on the secondary literature and previous scholarship of the child-saving movement at large.

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Chapter 1 Class, Ethnicity, and Faith: Factors in Shaping Community Responses to Progressivism

Fig. 1 – “‘The Wisdom of the West,’ Cover, Punch, or The London Charivari, May 4, 1910.”1

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause . . .

Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic”2

The Progressive Era was at its apex when its most recognizable champion, former president

Theodore Roosevelt, delivered his “Citizenship in a Republic” speech at the Sorbonne in Paris in the spring of 1910. Widely referred to as “The Man in the Arena,” Roosevelt’s oratory extolled

1 “The Wisdom of the West,” Cover, Punch, or the London Charivari, May 4, 1910. http://www.punch.co.uk/archive. 2 Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic,” (speech, Paris, France, Apr. 23, 1910), Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Learn-About- TR/TR-Encyclopedia/Culture-and-Society/Man-in-the-Arena.aspx. 17

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the virtues of direct action, a homily for the age. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century,

America transitioned from Gilded Age excess to Progressive Era moderation.3 Gilded Age

money came from urbanization, rapid developments in technology and science, modern

industrialization, and the emergence of a new class of savvy business leaders who helped shape

and, in several instances, dominate America’s dynamic entrepreneurial, commercial, and

economic landscape. Industrialists and financiers such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie,

and J. Pierpont Morgan reached the pinnacle of American corporate success through

advancements in marketing, mechanization, and manhandling the competition. Those who

sought power, but were unable to accumulate wealth through shrewd business dealings or family

inheritance, found an alternate avenue to influence as the sycophants of the wealthy, and as

exploiters of the poor and working class. The public and private corruption that arose from these

associations embodied by New York’s City’s Tammany Hall coexisted with the machine

politicians revered by the working poor, whose heroes they had become. The worldly goods coveted in the Gilded Age were closely held among the members of this fellowship of political and economic elite.

Yet, the glittering façade of the Gilded Age was unsubstantial. It tarnished quickly, exposing a host of social ills simmering just below the surface. In the decades following the U.S.

Civil War, labor strikes, unemployment, and underemployment rocked American society, underscoring the country’s neglect and devastation of the poor, African Americans, and recent

immigrants, principally from central, southern, and eastern Europe. The depressions of the

1890s, although short-lived, destabilized the economic landscape for working-class Americans

3 A term coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their dystopian novel The Gilded Age (1873) to signify a period of American industrial growth and accumulation of wealth that was marked by corruption within the political classes and an obsession with materialism. 18

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and heightened the sense of a perpetual struggle for daily existence in all quarters of society.

Seeking to mitigate, at least in part, the scornful image of America’s elite supplied by a loose

coalition of political critics and civic-minded satirists, cartoonists, and clerics, many nouveau riche figures followed Andrew Carnegie’s advice and undertook philanthropic efforts on a grand scale. He exhorted them to: “be but a trustee for the poor; intrusted (sic) for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community but administering it for the community far better

than it could or would have done for itself.”4 Notwithstanding the lasting impact of brick-and-

mortar philanthropic causes pioneered by Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, and others, largesse,

no matter how altruistically delivered, failed to vindicate the wealthy. The monied class, in the eyes of many detractors, was central, not incidental, to the problem of America’s countrywide social and economic disparity.

Occupying the vast gulf between those who struggled to feed themselves and those

whose larders overflowed with expensive wines and exotic foodstuffs was the rising middle class

– well fed, financially secure, and morally dogmatic. They comprised the majority of those who

sought to mitigate the economic and environmental factors that negatively affected the poor and

working class; factors that resulted in a measurable impact on the lives and life spans of those

less fortunate. Life expectancy rates for white males in the United States averaged 38 years and

white females 39 years in 1850. Rates for non-white males and females were marginally lower.

Over the eight decades that followed, the average increased by nearly twenty years across all

demographic categories.5 Deviations from these averages were numerous, however. Tangible

4 Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth,” North American Review, CCCXCI, June 1889. Online, Swarthmore.edu, https://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Carnegie.html. 5 Life expectancy statistics are skewed lower by inclusion of the number of children who died before the age of five. For example, in the United States in 1850, the average life expectancy for all live births was 38 for men and just over 39 for women. The life expectancy average increased by more than twenty years in part, when the pool of individuals was restricted to those who survived to at least age 5. J. David 19

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and intangible factors that influenced the life expectancy of Americans whether they resided in

cities or rural areas during this period included: access to clean water, sanitary living conditions

and lifestyle, air free from smoke and chemical contaminants, and a food supply that was fresh or

properly preserved. Residents who possessed the means sufficient to insulate themselves from

detrimental influences expected expect to live longer; the poor and working class were not so

fortunate.

The troubling union that resulted from a marriage of the long arms of social control to the

moral challenges among America’s elite class, inspired a groundswell of middle-class opposition

to the status quo that surfaced in the late nineteenth century. In time, as historian Michael

McGerr argues, the middle class became unified in its desire to exercise:

the control of big business, the amelioration of poverty, and the purification of politics to embrace the transformation of gender relations, the regeneration of the home, the disciplining of leisure and pleasure, and the establishment of segregation ... strikingly, they intended nothing less than to transform other Americans, to remake the nation’s feuding polyglot population in their own middle class image.6

Members of the middle class essentially sought to establish a logical social order for the modern

world, unimpeded by the psychological burden of immense wealth or the existential burdens of

oppressive poverty.7 They alone negotiated the uneven terrain between the hazards at each end of the nation’s industrial capitalist cultural spectrum. Voluntary associations spawned by the middle class, whether cultural, social, or religious in nature, became incubators for reform movements

heavily populated by women across the country. These associations included the Women’s

Christian Temperance Union, the women’s suffrage movement and its lodestars, Susan B.

Hacker, “Decennial Life Tables for the White Population of the United States, 1790-1900,” Historical Methods, 43: 2 (Apr. 2010), 45-79, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2885717/. 6 McGerr, xiv. 7 Boyer, viii-ix. 20

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Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among others, the settlement house movement with its luminaries such as Jane Addams and Lillian D. Wald, prison reform, educational reform, and child welfare and child labor reform led by Florence Kelley. They identified a long list of troubles that required their righteous, steady hand in reform efforts.

Throughout this study, women will play major roles in reform and in front-line orphan care and philanthropy. Sometimes we know their names, often, they remain anonymous in the record.

They were, as Louise DeKoven Bowen said of the philanthropic women of Chicago, “women who will get out and push; who will put their shoulders to the wheel and their whole hearts into their work.”8

The middle class inhabited the professions most frequently required in public service by federal, state, and local government agencies: lawyers, accountants, and social workers. These bureaucrats embraced the notion of the transformative aspect of the Progressive Era. They also warmed to the ideas of social welfare that was nurtured by ministers and adherents of what was referred to as the Social Gospel movement. Its liberal Christian principles, specifically those of

Protestant Christianity, found various outlets for social reform impulses, including child welfare, child labor, and the nexus of this study, the care of dependent children. It will be discussed more fully in Chapter 2.

Large-scale reforms were accomplished through the intervention of government agencies and their functionaries, and from the perspective of the middle class, their efforts fed the well of social reform. Yet, reformers were not always interested in bringing positive change to immigrant populations. In the Midwest, where the majority of immigration was European, this

8 Louise DeKoven Bowen, Speeches, Addresses and Letters, 1 (Ann Arbor, 1937), 61 in Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton University Press: 2002), 10. 21

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bias was extended to those immigrants were members of either the Catholic or Jewish faiths.9

Initial advocates of the Progressive Era’s child-saving movement “had a strong Protestant bias” and their altruism was tainted by anti-Catholic and antisemitic sentiment.10 Evidence of the

religious sensibility of Progressive middle-class activists and the group’s impact, especially at the regional level, is illustrated by the Herschedes of Cincinnati, the Guskys of Pittsburgh,

Cleveland’s Mother Donovan, and others. Their stories are woven through this study as we assess their responses to the crises of orphaned children through the lens of their faith in

Chapters 3, 4, and 5. These efforts also mirror the two historical paths of society’s treatment of orphans: the “kindness of strangers,” where individuals took an abandoned or orphaned child into their homes, and the path which promoted the idea that institutional orphanage settings were the logical place for “‘friendless orphans’ or other children who literally had no place to go.”11

The cities in this study are either firmly, or arguably, in the Midwest. The “Midwest” is

principally a renaming of the historical Northwest Territory. Perhaps it is more easily defined as

what it is not rather than what is it (not the East, not New England, not the Atlantic seaboard, not

the Gulf Coast, not the South, not the Deep South, not the Mountain West, not the Southwest, not

the Pacific coast, not the Northwest, not Alaska, Hawaii, or Texas). There are many

interpretations of which states fall in the Midwest region but the United States Bureau of Labor

Statistics sets the number of states at ten. Three of these states (the Dakotas and Nebraska) and

significant parts of three others (Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois) are also included in the Great

9 Although, certainly, immigration of other ethnic groups and nationalities (e.g., Chinese and Japanese immigrants), were touchstones of immigration battles in other parts of the country. 10 Cohen, 273-74. 11 Joel F. Harrington, The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 155. 22

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Plains, shrinking the Midwest region to four: Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.12 Missing

from this definition is Pennsylvania. At first blush, this is problematic for the parameters of this

study, but I rely on the school of thought that Western Pennsylvania in general, and Pittsburgh in

particular, have more in common with Ohio than they do Philadelphia and the Atlantic

seaboard.13 Pittsburgh occupies the western boundary area of the Northeast – on the border

between colonial America, the Appalachians, and the frontier. It has an industrial economic base

that places it on a footing with Midwest cities such as Cleveland and Detroit, and its human

demographic fits the mold of Midwesterners posited by The Ohio State University’s Humanist

Institute: “Midwesterners … ‘are thought to be strong, brave, polite, hard-working, self-effacing,

self-sufficient, generous, friendly, Protestant, white, normal, average and boring.’”14 The motto

of Miami University of Ohio, prodesse quam conspici (to produce, rather than to be

conspicuous), is also an appropriate aphorism for the regional attitude of the Midwest in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and within that definition, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and

Pittsburgh were, and perhaps still are, decidedly Midwest.15

Traditionally, the Midwest has merited little historical scholarship. There are two

principal reasons for the scant academic curiosity. First, the somewhat tongue-in-cheek

description from the previous paragraph is filled with generalized assumptions, some accurate,

some exaggerated, about the people of the Midwest. Certainly, such an interpretation has done

12 “Defining the Great Plains” U.S. Forest Service, https://www.fs.usda.gov/rmrs/science- spotlights/defining-great-plains. 13 Brian Page and Richard Walker, “From Settlement to Fordism: The Agro-Industrial Revolution in the American Midwest,” Economic Geography, 67:4, Oct. 1991, 281-82, n. 1. Also see Phillip J. Obermiller and Michael E. Maloney, “Looking for Appalachians in Pittsburgh: Seeking ‘Deliverance’ and Finding the ‘Deer Hunter,’ Pittsburgh History, Winter, 1990, 160-69. 14 The Midwest: An Interpretation, eds. Andrew R. L. Cayton, Richard Sisson, and Christian Zacher, The Ohio State University: College of Arts and Sciences: Humanities Institute, http://www.humanist.osu.edu. 15 Ibid. 23

24:11 little to inspire academics across the disciplines, even those who use regionalism as a lens of analysis, to conduct significant tranches of research into the Midwest. Second, the Midwest has, for the most part, escaped the large-scale human drama that historians tend to write about. The ravages of violent armed conflict of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, even the U.S.

Civil War, licked at the edges of the Midwest but did not decimate its cities or surrounding countryside to the extent that it did in other regions of the nation. Natural disasters, with the notable exceptions of devastating river flooding and occasional tornados, strike elsewhere. The hurricanes of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains, the blizzards that plague the Mountain West, and the earthquakes of the West coast generally have had little impact on the states that make up the Midwest region. The lack of large-scale drama is a quality that should not be underestimated, many difficulties would have their origins in human conflict.

Routine settlement of the territory in the Midwest began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most of the original settlers to the Midwest were transplants from New

England and the Atlantic seaboard. The immigrants who followed them came to the United

States for an array of reasons: economic opportunity, religious freedom, and a fresh beginning.

In their new land, they created a dense social fabric knitting their lives together along existing religious and cultural lines that became objects for daily cultural negotiation as cities became more diverse. The first to come in significant numbers were the Germans between 1810 and

1840. They tended to treat the Atlantic seaboard cities as a mere disembarkation point on their lengthier journey to lands opened for settlement after the American Revolution. These were the artisans, craftsmen, and hardy farm families looking for opportunity to begin a new life in

America. They established the nascent ethnic communities that anchored the waves of immigrants that followed. The second stage flowed from the failed 1848 Revolutions in central

24:11 and western European lands and those impacted by the Irish potato famine. This historical map, with the locations of Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh added, indicates the proximity of these cities to one another, and their relative positions within the Midwest.

Fig. 2 – “‘Map of the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne & Chicago and Cleveland and Pittsburg, Grand Rapids, Indiana, and Pennsylvania Railroads’ (1874) Rand McNally and Co.”16

This second tranche of immigrants was dominated by two groups. The first represented the professional class from central Europe that included physicians, lawyers, and those with financial means adequate to begin new lives. The second was dominated by Irish laborers and working poor from other nations who had come principally to escape starvation. Among both groups, many of the newcomers were politically engaged and found their way into the halls of power, either through the saloon or the courthouse. The final stage began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and resulted from push factors such as German unification, Italian

16 “Map of the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne & Chicago and Cleveland and Pittsburg, Grand Rapids and Indiana, and Pennsylvania Railroads” (1874), Rand McNally and Co., Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3701p.rr005340. 25

24:11 unification, and a renewed antisemitic fervor across much of Europe. These immigrants began their journeys in places such as Hungary, the Balkans, Poland, Italy, Greece, and the Russian

Pale of Settlement and each successive surge integrated itself further into established ethnic communities, if not always the community at large. Much of Cincinnati’s new immigrant arrivals slowed before this third wave thus contributing to the city’s insular ethnic German identity.

Cleveland and Pittsburgh both drew new residents long into the twentieth century as their industrial bases continued to expand.

Although the majority of the first wave of immigrants and transplants to the United States were Protestant, minority religions including Jews and Catholics were also present. The first Jew to reach the shores of North America was a Bohemian mining engineer and metallurgist named

Joachim Gaunse, attached to the 1585 Roanoke Island Colony’s first expedition.17 Gaunse returned safely to England with others from this first expedition, avoiding the fate of the members of the 1587 expedition who disappeared when the second colony collapsed in 1589.

Not long after his return to England, however, he was indicted on the charge of blasphemy for having denied the divinity of Christ. He was never tried, likely as a result of the intercession of members of Elizabeth I’s Privy Council, who had made substantial personal profits from

Gaunse’s contributions to improvements in the copper smelting process.18 The next recorded arrival of Jews in North America came in 1654, nearly three-quarters of a century after Roanoke

II, when two dozen Jewish refugees from Portuguese Brazil reached New Amsterdam.

Perhaps passive antipathy is too woolly a characterization of the reaction these refugees received upon their arrival, but not by much. Hatred and misapprehension of Jews was no less virulent on this continent, colonized by those who desired religious freedom, than it was in

17 Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (Yale University Press, 2004), 1. 18 “Joachim Gaunse,” JewishVirtualLibrary.org, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joachim-gaunse. 26

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Europe and other European colonies. For a time, the manifestations of antisemitism seemed

perhaps less overt, attributable in part to the Jews’ decision to isolate themselves. Unlike non-

Jewish immigrants, they immediately drew within the self-imposed boundaries of their enclaves to establish their own lives before they ventured into relationships with the growing communities in which they now lived. As Hasia Diner has argued, “These highly regulated, self-governing, and hierarchical Jewish communities” were, at first, limited to a few Atlantic coast ports and later in Richmond, Virginia, the gateway to the lands beyond the Appalachian mountains.19

From tight-knit “American outposts of the Jewish communities of Amsterdam, London, and

several others scattered around the Caribbean,” Jewish immigrants to colonial America focused

on maintaining:

traditions such as … the Sabbath, eating kosher food, and preparing Jewish children for life in a Jewish world. At a more profound level, the Jewish differed from other Americans by virtue of their … participation in a set of practices whose origins went back millennia … and from their identification with people from around the world in whom they discerned a commonality of history and fate.20

Early settlements in Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, New York, and Savannah, grew slowly,

but consistently. At the time of the American Revolution, there were fewer than 2,500 Jews in

the colonies and as historian Jonathan D. Sarna argues, the majority of them “cast their lot for

independence.”21 American Jews committed to finding a way to balance their ancient faith with

their new American citizenship.

The earliest Jewish immigrants came from both Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities

and typically funded their own voyages to America. Over time, those communities, both in

America and abroad, with more significant assets, pooled resources to allow widows, orphans,

19 Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654-2000 (University of California Press, 2000), 3. 20 Ibid. 21 Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (Yale University Press, 2004), 31. 27

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and others without adequate financial support to make the journey. As a result, during the mid- to

late-eighteenth century, the number of Ashkenazim arriving in America far outweighed their

Sephardic co-religionists.22 This imbalance resulted in a push of Ashkenazic Jews, mostly newer

immigrants from Germany and Poland, out of America’s coastal port cities to the west as new

territory began to open for settlement. Germans of all faiths were on the move to build new lives

in the mid-nineteenth century. Some relocated from small villages to the industrializing cities of

their German homeland at the same time others emigrated to the United States.23 German Jewish

immigrants from the period rarely traveled as an entire family because of the cost. Where

German gentile farmers sold their land and implements to fund the travel for an entire family,

Jews usually had no such nest egg of tangible assets to be liquidated for cash.24 What they did do

was send one family member ahead, usually a young adult child, who then sent money back for

another to travel, typically a sibling: “This ‘pulling-after’ of brothers, sisters, and other relatives is indeed the most significant feature of the German Jewish immigration to America.”25

Thus, single men and women were at the center of German Jewish immigration and

siblings were the nucleus around which immigration to the United States revolved. These adult

siblings had often run out of opportunities for work or marriage in Germany and had become

extra mouths to feed around the family table. In cases “where the only immigrant was a female,

marriage is to be assumed as the purpose of emigration, and no other family problem is likely to

have been solved by her emigration.”26 The thought of sending a young daughter alone to a new

country induced multiple layers of anxiety. One way to mitigate those fears was to send her in

22 Diner, The Jews of the United States, 28-29. 23 Rudolf Glanz, “The German Jewish Mass Emigration: 1820-1880,” Journal of the American Jewish Archives (April 1970), 49. 24 Ibid, 52. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 55. 28

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the company of trusted family friends or willing co-religionists. In fact, the Jewish press featured

the stories of “young girls traveling with groups of immigrants. Under such circumstances, help

to emigrating Jewish girls was regarded by the Jewish communities of Germany as a direct help

to the bride in the old Jewish tradition.”27 The preparation required by such an undertaking

usually precluded spontaneous travel, and a family’s future was too important to leave to chance.

“German Jewish emigration represented the rationally planned transportation of a generation of

youth with the subsequent founding of a family on new soil.”28 Once established with jobs and a

home, families might eventually be able to pay for other extended family members to join them.

The second wave of European Jewish immigration was distinctly different from that of

the German wave. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the bulk of immigrants

came from among eastern European Jews, principally from Russian and Poland, who faced

“persecutions, pogroms, and imperial ukases of an oppressive nature.”29 America was thought to offer “abundant opportunity for all, without distinction as to race or creed” but this was a “mixed blessing … persecution in Europe made the liberty of America seem most desirable … on the other hand, the new liberty was considered an inducement to the breaking of traditional bonds and a threat to religion.”30 The increased arrivals of Jewish emigres meant a potential shift away

from the traditions of orthodox faith. The concept of American liberty won in a comparison with

persecution of European Jews but was such freedom too much of a good thing, allowing

normally observant Jews to stray from tradition?31

27 Der Orient (Ellwangen, Wuerttemberg, May 11, 1846) Juedisches Volksblatt, VI (1859), 8, cited in Glanz, 57, n. 11. 28 Glanz, 66. 29 Sanford Ragins, “The Image of America in Two East European Hebrew Periodicals,” Journal of the American Jewish Archives (Nov. 1965), 143. (143-161) 30 Ibid., 145. 31 Ibid. 29

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With the population of Jewish immigrants on the rise, Orthodox American Jews whose

ancestors first arrived in the nation more than a century before, were faced with a potential

cleaving of the faith:

The cultural differences between West and East European Jews were deepened in America – largely because the German Jews had already been in the land for some time. Now the raw, poor, Yiddish-speaking immigrant arrived … The intra- Jewish stratification and tension were caused … because the Russians felt that the Germans had left the Torah, while the Germans could not understand why the Russians did not follow the spirit of the time. There was no social mixing between the two groups; each had its own synagogues, its own rabbis and customs.32

Here then was a battle for denominational authenticity and superiority. Both sides believed that

their way was the correct way, in fact, the only way. Acculturated Jewish German-Americans viewed themselves as observant, if not Orthodox Jews, and sophisticated, established members of the community. In comparison, newly arrived Russian and Eastern European Jews felt superior because they had remained faithful to orthodoxy without selling out to the temptations of modern America. Yet, any attempt by an outsider to find fault with the intrareligious battle was met with harsh rebuke. In fact:

that strife did not lead to absolute disunity … when the Jew was in distress, or gained prominence, all would cry out or take pride. They united on every matter concerning them before their Christian neighbors, and if there was no great love between German and Russian Jews, the former did band together in charitable associations for the welfare of the latter.33

New ideas about gender segregation at temple, rites of worship, and religious education, for

example, spread by recently arrived European Jews, were complicating factors to be resolved

within American Judaism. David Philipson, rabbi of Cincinnati’s B’nai Israel Temple (Rockdale

Temple) from 1888 to 1948, kept a personal diary from his days as a student in the first class to

32 Hamelitz, XIX (1883) 19, 53-54 quoted in Ragins, 153. 33 Ragins, 153. 30

24:11 be ordained at Hebrew Union College, through his years at K.K. B’nai Israel. His entry for July

21, 1905 begins:

The same phenomenon that occurred among the German Jews in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, when the doors of the modern world were thrown open, is apparent now among the younger Russian Jews in the United States … In their new freedom, they threw away all the accouterments of their old life including the religions; of all things unprogressive, they consider the synagogue the most so; and this is true of the synagogue as they know it. They have no conception or knowledge of the Reform Movement and of its program of squaring the interpretation of the faith with the demands of modern thought and modern life; hence, an irreligious, atheistic generation is growing up in the ghettos. The old Judaism they will not have, the new Judaism they know not.34

As Catholic Americans had to learn to resolve the differences between adherence to their faith and their American freedoms, American Jews also had to find a tolerable equilibrium between their own dual identities.

The resolution was sought not only within the founding American Jewish communities along the Atlantic coast, but within the outposts of Jewish settlement further west. The first

Jewish settlers in Cincinnati arrived in 1817, in Cleveland in 1836, and in Pittsburgh in the early

1840s. Once in place, these communities continued to grow, both through the addition of new immigrants and a natural increase in population.

Table 135 Jewish Populations

ca. 1878/1880/% 1907/1910/% 1927/1930/%______Cincinnati 8,000/255,139 3.13 25,000/353,591 7.07 23,500/451,160 5.20 Cleveland 3,500/160,046 2.18 40,000/580,663 6.89 85,000/900,429 7.44 Pittsburgh 2,000/156,389 1.28 25,000/533.905 4.68 53,000/669,817 7.91

34 David Philipson, “Strangers to a Strange Land,” Journal of the American Jewish Archives, November 1966, 136. 35 Excerpted from “Table 1: U.S. Jewish Communities of 1,000 or More Population,” in Lee Shai Weissbach, “The Jewish Communities of the United States on the Eve of Mass Migration: Some Comments on Geography and Bibliography,” American Jewish History (Sep. 1988), 84. I have amended Weissbach’s table to include United States Census Report, total population statistics for 1880, 1910, and 1930 and percentages of Jewish population rounded up to the nearest one-hundredth percent. 31

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As they traveled west to settle, these Jewish immigrants brought with them not only the basic

tenets of their faith but also their ideas about charity toward those less fortunate within their

communities. These were certainly not new ideas, although they adapted to new realities when

faced with modern challenges.

The first Catholics in colonial America arrived in the province of Maryland in 1634,

under a land grant from King Charles I to Roman Catholic Cecil Calvert (Lord Baltimore) in

1632. The overwhelming majority of Catholic immigration to colonial America in the

seventeenth century settled in either Maryland or Pennsylvania, arriving in Philadelphia in 1689.

Over the following century, they grew into a small contingent, estimated at less than 1,400 in

1757 and they met not in churches, but in “mass-houses.”36 The first Catholics in the western part of the state were the Franciscan missionaries who erected the altar at Ft. Duquesne in the early eighteenth century but the first resident priest was Fr. William F. X. O’Brien who did not arrive until the fall of 1808. He undertook overseeing construction of the first Catholic church in

the city, St. Patrick’s, within a few weeks of his arrival. Pittsburgh’s early Catholic community

was primarily comprised of native-born descendants of Maryland Catholics. According to

Pittsburgh Diocesan records, Catholics were rarely troubled by anti-Catholic bigotry in the

opening decades of the nineteenth century.37 The temperature of the situation escalated with increased immigration. Irish and German Catholics began to arrive in larger numbers mid- nineteenth century and Pittsburgh achieved diocesan status in 1843.

36 All Roman Catholics over the age of twelve. “A List of All the Roman Catholics in Pennsylvania, 1757,” in A. A. Lambing, History of the Catholic Church in the Dioceses of Pittsburg and Allegheny from Its Establishment to Its Present Time (Benziger Brothers, 1880), 24. 37 Paul Dvorchak, “Reluctant First Bishop Had Multiples Struggles in Pittsburgh,” Apr. 17, 2019, Pittsburgh Catholic, https://documenting.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A00aga8651m/viewer#page/26/mode/2up. 32

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Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pittsburgh continued its exponential growth which resulted in a transformation of the religious face of the city. The significant Protestant majority that dominated through the mid-eighteenth century gave way to a

Roman Catholic one by 1906.38 At the turn of the twentieth century, Pittsburghers’ religious affiliations were 54% Roman Catholic, 1% Jewish, 36% various non-Catholic Christian denominations, and 9% other. This change directly reflected the increased immigration from central, southern, and eastern Europe and the newly arrived settled in one of the thirty-six

Pittsburgh neighborhoods that were defined by factors of nature (the rivers and hillsides), infrastructure (railroad tracks), and ethnicity. They gravitated toward neighborhoods where they lived alongside others with similar language, customs, and religion. These enclaves often sat close to the Central Business District and industrial neighborhoods along the shores of the rivers.

They were densely populated and the belching smokestacks that signaled economic prosperity left a scar on the built environment and the health of the residents as well The population of the city in 1920 soared to 588,343 and nearly 700,000 in 1930. Pittsburgh had become on the largest cities in the nation.

Catholics migrated as individuals or individual families to the Ohio Valley from

European colonies as early as 1775. The pace of settlement quickened when Catholic families from Maryland set out for new lands in the west, traveling together in significant numbers to what is now central Kentucky. During this initial period of concentrated migration, the population of Catholics in the area grew to more than three hundred. This critical mass of

Catholics on the frontier convinced church authorities to send them a priest. Not long after, Pope

38 William Chamberlin Hunt, United States Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies: 1906 (United States Government Printing Office, 1910), 1, 350.

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Pius VII awarded the first inland diocese to Bardstown, Kentucky in 1808 at the same time he

created the diocesan territories of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

Cincinnati was originally a spiritual province of the Bardstown Diocese and the first

bishop appointed for Bardstown was Fr. Joseph Flaget, exiled from his ancestral French home as

a consequence of the French Revolution. He arrived in Bardstown in 1811 but the spiritual and

geographic territory for which he was responsible included that from the “Great Lakes to the

Deep South and from the Allegheny Mountains to the Mississippi River.”39 Concurrent with the

slowed pace of immigration to Bardstown, Cincinnati became a magnet for immigrants from

German lands and across the religious spectrum: Lutherans in 1814, Catholics in 1819, and Jews

in 1824.40 Cincinnati enticed Germans with its solid economic opportunity as well as its

geography that was a doppelgänger for the Rhineland and rolling hills of central and southern

German lands. The growth was so significant that the city was granted archdiocesan status in

1821, just two years after the first Catholic church was consecrated. Holy Trinity (Heilige

Dreieinigkeit), a German speaking parish in what was the West End, was the first Catholic

church in the city. Cincinnati’s first cathedral, Saint Francis Xavier, was consecrated in 1826.

Yet, outsiders continued to oppose Catholicism and rebuke Catholic dogma and papal authority

as so much pettifoggery, through much of the mid- to late-nineteenth century.

With a population that was static for much of the early nineteenth century, the spiritual

needs of the first Cleveland Catholics were met by traveling missionaries and priests, first out of

the Cincinnati Archdiocese and then out of the Diocese of Detroit.41 Mass and sacraments were

39 “Brief History of the Archdiocese,” Archdiocese of Louisville, https://www.archlou.org/about-the- archdiocese/history/. 40 “A Portrait and a History: The Archdiocese of Cincinnati,” CatholicCincinnati.org, http://www.catholiccincinnati.org/about-us-2/a-portrait/. 41 Henry B. Leonard, “Catholics, Roman” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University, http://case.edu/ech/articles/c/catholics-roman. 34

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celebrated intermittently in distant outposts like Cleveland until it received diocesan status of its

own in 1847.42 Cleveland’s first bishop was French-born Louis Amadeus Rappe. He served as

Cleveland’s bishop for almost a quarter of a century and oversaw the establishment of sixteen parishes (and their parochial schools), along with St. Mary’s Seminary, and St. Vincent Charity

Hospital. Rappe was productive but increasingly unpopular during his episcopate. He repeatedly frustrated the desire of Cleveland Catholics who wanted to establish parishes to serve exclusively ethnic enclaves, especially among the large German and Irish immigrant populations. He resisted building these single-ethnicity, or nationality churches, and he intentionally installed French- speaking priests in heavily Irish-Catholic parishes to force the point. Both communities complained vociferously to Rome about Rappe’s actions. By the time he acquiesced to papal authority, it cost him the bishopric.43

Cleveland’s Catholics remained committed to the establishment of nationality parishes

well into the twentieth century. They were buoyed in their quest by Rappe’s successors Richard

Gilmour, who served from 1872 to 1891, and Ignatius F. Horstmann, who served from 1892 to

1908, but diocesan support came with a price tag, financial and administrative. The parishes

were obligated by both Gilmour and Horstmann to build parochial schools and to guarantee that

children attended Catholic, rather than public, schools. This institutional pressure, combined with

that of dynamic Catholic family expansion, was extraordinarily successful. Between 1890 and

1909, the population of parochial schools within the Cleveland Diocese nearly tripled, exceeding

20,000 students.44

42 Guide to Catholic Records about Native Americans in the U.S., Vol. 1: Eastern United States: Ohio: OH-2, Marquette University, http://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/NativeGuide/OH-2.ph 43 In 1870, Rappe returned to missionary service in the northeastern U.S. He died in Vermont in 1886. 44 Leonard, “Catholics, Roman.” 35

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By 1911, more than 350 parishes, churches, and synagogues populated Cleveland’s

neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, it was the Catholic church that demonstrated the greatest

variety among the national origins of its parishioners. There were the Irish, Bohemians, the

Polish, Slovakians, Slovenians, Italians, Syrians, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Romanians, and of

course, the ubiquitous Germans. Nationality-based Catholic parishes occupied a significant part of this convergence of social and religious life in Cleveland’s immigrant neighborhoods and were emblematic of the type of changes that each of these religious communities underwent during Cleveland’s years of rapid growth. It is not possible, within the scope of this study, to produce a table similar to Table 1 above, showing total Catholic population of these cities.

Sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark first addressed the difficulty in quantifying nineteenth century church membership in 1986.45 Using census data enumerated in 1850, 1860,

and 1870, they attempted to “reconstruct detailed membership estimates … by means of

weighted least squares equations.”46 The scholarship was updated in 2016 to cover data

generated in the 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 United States Census.47 Ultimately, this reveals a

110-year gap in the research data, but a career’s worth of work for a cadre of sociologists.

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh is an outlier in the geographical community known as the American Midwest.

Its cultural character does not mesh with much of the eastern half of the state of Pennsylvania dominated by Philadelphia and even less with eastern urban centers such as New York City.

Pittsburgh is a city of innovation and industry and its location at the headwaters of the Ohio

45 Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, “Turning Pews into People: Estimating 19th Century Church Membership,” Journal for Scientific Study of Religion, (1986) 25:2, 180-192. 46 Finke and Stark, “Turning Pews into People,” 180. 47 Rachel Bacon, Roger Finke, and Dale Jones, “Merging the Religious Congregations and Membership Studies: A Data File for Documentary American Religious Change,” Review of Religious Research (2016) 60:3, 403-422. 36

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River made it an exceptional launch pad for settlement further west. That urbanization had a

distinct impact on the development of the city. Pittsburgh’s eventual location was first mentioned

in a report by a Pennsylvania fur trader in 1717. Over the three decades that followed, European

expeditions that included the English, Germans, and French, navigated the Allegheny,

Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers, establishing trading posts and repeatedly clashing with one

another over territorial control. In contrast to the founding of Cincinnati and Cleveland discussed

below, relatively peaceful undertakings by comparison, Pittsburgh’s journey to settlement was

marked by early colonial warfare between European powers and their respective Native

American allies. Much of the first three quarters of the eighteenth century passed in a cycle that

followed a familiar path: attack, battle, surrender, and revenge. This experience certainly

influenced the mindset of the early settlers, as well as their descendants, to dig in and defend

what they felt was theirs.48

In the summer of 1749, Pierre-Joseph Celeron de Blainville, head of an expedition that included French soldiers, Canadians, and native peoples, claimed possession of the entire Ohio

Valley for Louis XV of France.49 Over the quarter century that followed, the location remained a strategic prize in the ongoing military competition between the British and French. A final, pyrrhic victory by the British in November of 1758 left them in possession of the ashes of Fort

Duquesne that they renamed Fort Pitt in honor of the English prime minister. Within a year of the British occupation of the fort, the surrounding settlement reached a population of 149 civilians, growing to more than 200 by the spring of 1761. As residents came to learn throughout

Pittsburgh’s history, its location at the confluence of the rivers also repeatedly left it vulnerable

48 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4, 387-409, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240. 49 George A. Wood, “Celeron de Blainville and French Expansion in the Ohio Valley,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 9:4 (Mar. 1923), 302-19. 37

24:11 to the ravages of rising water. March of 1763 began with flooding that swamped the fort under half a foot of river water and ended with Pontiac’s attacks against white settlers that drove

Pittsburgh’s civilians inside the fort’s walls. Ninety days into the siege, the buildings in the settlement that had not been destroyed were burned to the ground by Pontiac’s warriors. Three months later, when Pontiac was defeated at the Battle of Bushy Run, civilians began to return to their land to rebuild. Fort Pitt and the surrounding area were soon at the center of an unresolved dispute over a territorial boundary between Virginia and Pennsylvania that shattered the recently- secured, if relative calm. The uproar ended only when the dispute’s instigator, Lord Dunmore, the British governor of Virginia, abandoned the western front when colonial unrest began to threaten British control of territory closer to Virginia’s capital. Following the end of the

Revolutionary War, the citizens returned once again to rebuilding their homes and businesses.

By 1800, the population of Pittsburgh had risen to more than 1,500 individuals and steadily increased with every census thereafter into the twentieth century.

Buoyed by the relative safety of their land being free from further incursion of native peoples or British forces, the residents allowed themselves the luxury of creating community bonds beyond those of mutual aid for survival’s sake alone. The first organized religious assemblage was the German Evangelical Protestant (Congregational) Church that met in 1782.

Four years later, the Penn family donated equal parcels of land to the German Evangelical

Protestant, First Presbyterian, and Trinity Protestant Episcopal churches. These Protestant denominations grew to include the Methodist Episcopal Church (1796), the Reformed

Presbyterian Church (1799), the Associate Presbyterian Church (1801), St. Luke’s Protestant

Episcopal Congregation (1805), and in 1827, the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first black church west of the Allegheny Mountains. The city’s first Roman Catholic Church,

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Old St. Patrick’s, was dedicated in 1811 and in 1843, Pittsburgh welcomed its first bishop, the

Rt. Rev. Michael O’Connor, to lead the diocese that was created from the Diocese of

Philadelphia. That same year, at the request of Bishop O’Connor, seven members of the Sisters

of Mercy emigrated from Ireland and established a provincial house in the city, the first women

religious of any order.50 The forerunner of the present Congregation Rodef Shalom, the Society

of Jews, was founded in 1846. Pittsburgh had become a pluralistic city where minority faiths and

majority-minority faiths claimed a role in the development of the city’s continued growth.

Like both Cleveland and Cincinnati, Pittsburgh’s development was dictated by its

physical features. Its topographical elements (rivers, elevations, percentage of land above sea

level) outnumber those of both Cleveland and Cincinnati—making it more challenging to tame

by several degrees of difficulty. Glacial advances contributed to Cleveland’s topography, leaving

it quite flat stopping just north of Cincinnati, providing it with its so-called Roman-style hills.

Pittsburgh sits at the confluence of three rivers smack in the middle of the Appalachian Plateau.

Its elevation is, on average, 250 feet above sea level higher than Cleveland and 400 feet higher than Cincinnati and approximately eighty-five percent of its land surface is hilly terrain.

Pittsburgh’s topographical features served as “significant delineators for cultural, political, and social development.”51 In fact, Timothy Kelly emphasizes, the city’s geography controlled the

type and location of industrial development necessarily contributing to an environment that

created limitations on “economic, social, and demographic” growth, including ethnic

neighborhoods and religious enclaves.52

50 “Women religious” is a term used throughout this study. It is an accepted descriptor that denotes women who chose lives within religious orders, primarily Roman Catholic, differentiating them from the devout women who nonetheless lived their lives as part of the secular world. 51 Timothy Kelly, “Pittsburgh Catholicism,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 18:4, Religious Geography: The Significance of Regions and the Power of Places, Part Two (Fall 2000), 64. 52 Ibid., 65. 39

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The physical environment prescribed where people built homes in relation to their places of employment. Understandably, workers wanted access to stores, schools, and churches that were within easy walking distance, or that were served by trolleys or the incline railroad cars that traveled up and down the hillsides. Rather than ethnicity being the sole demographic in

Pittsburgh neighborhoods, a dominant determining factor was this proximity to employment.

Within the boundaries of these “company” neighborhoods, ethnic and religious communities eventually grew to support nationality churches and ethnic philanthropic associations.53 Devout

Catholics of the time were expected to go to confession regularly, and attend mass weekly, if not daily. According to Kelly, “Pittsburgh combined small parish size with a high percentage of ethnic or national parishes … in other words … constructed their religious and social worlds around small ethnically homogenous communities.”54 To some extent, Kelly’s observation on

Pittsburgh’s unique parish dispersion is mitigated by an abundance of nationality churches in

Cleveland, but his point on parish size compared to the cities in this study is valid.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Pittsburgh marketplace included twenty-three general stores, six shoe shops, four hat shops, and four bakeries among a total of sixty-three retail stores. Industrial concerns also began weaving themselves into the fabric of city. In 1802, the Pittsburgh Almanack published that the city was home to “one large brewery, two glassworks, one fine-glass factory, one large paper mill, several oil mills, powder works, ironworks, saltworks, saw – and grist – mills, and a boat yard.”55 The total value of Pittsburgh manufacturing the next year topped $350,000. Bridges connecting the hills from one part of the city to the next sprang up at the rate of two to three each year during the nineteenth century,

53 Ibid., 68. 54 Ibid., 70 55 Ibid. 40

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replaced routinely as they became obsolete. According to the 1850 Pittsburgh Directory, the

value of manufacturing for the city was estimated at $50,000,000. At the close of the 1850s, oil

was discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania, 75 miles north of the city. Within five years, there

were nearly 60 oil refineries in the city producing 26,000 barrels each week. As Henry Warren’s

landscape “Pittsburgh from an Island in the Allegheny River” shows, even in 1800, Pittsburgh

was a city of impressive industrial muscle. Soft, dirty, and inexpensive bituminous coal burned

in the furnaces powering steel manufacturing and other industries seven days a week producing

thick clouds of black smoke that were draped like mourning shrouds over the early industrial skyline.56

Fig. 3 – “Henry Warren, ‘Pittsburgh from an Island in the Allegheny River,’ ca. 1800.”57

By the time the tide ebbed on the financial growth of nineteenth century magnates of

industry and finance with ties to the city, they had turned their attention to securing their legacy

through philanthropy. Carnegie began doling out significant portions of his wealth in 1881. He

was in a different milieu, but utilized his usual methods in determining how to distribute the

bounty of his life’s labor in ways that benefited a plurality of the city’s residents. When he died

56 David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 57 Henry Warren, “Pittsburgh from an Island in the Allegheny River,” (ca. 1800). 41

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in August of 1919, Carnegie had already funded philanthropic causes in the aggregate of

$350,000,000. On a smaller scale was Carnegie’s former colleague, Henry Clay Frick. When the

Pittsburgh Bank for Savings suddenly shuttered its doors three days before Christmas in 1915,

Frick repaid the $169,000 in savings lost by schoolchildren who had funds on deposit with the

bank. For him, it was a small gesture, yet its impact was mightily significant. He also had a

considerable role in the legacy of community giving by Pittsburgh industrialists. During his

lifetime, Frick donated more than $60,000,000 toward charitable institutions and programs.

Upon his death just four months after Carnegie, Frick’s bequest of an additional $22,000,000,

plus real estate, to philanthropies in the Pittsburgh region was fulfilled.

Beyond financial gifts that supported academic and cultural institutions, Pittsburghers of

more modest means had long sponsored charitable organizations that sought to care for those in

the community who were struggling with daily existence. The Pittsburgh Humane Society was

organized in 1813 and the city’s taxpayer-funded Alms House was built in 1820. In 1875, Mrs.

William A. Herron and Mrs. William Thaw organized the Pittsburgh Association for the

Improvement of the Poor to help care for those impacted by the 1874 Depression. In a foreshadowing of New Deal-style public works efforts, the citizens of Pittsburgh contributed to a fund to be used to put 1,000 to 2,000 men left unemployed as a result of the Depression of 1893 to work on city projects. Socialite Mrs. Mary Croghan Schenley, donated 300 acres of her family’s land in 1899 to the city for the development of a public park, later named in her family’s honor, as well as the land for construction of a facility to house the Western

Pennsylvania Society for the Blind. Pittsburgh had gained a reputation as a hardworking, hardheaded city where people took care of one another. Those who had made their fortunes utilizing the sweat and labor of others gave back to the city in ways that benefitted the city as a

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whole. Pittsburgh was marked by strong ethnic neighborhoods, vibrant religious traditions, and

robust labor union employment.

Cincinnati

Fig. 4 – “‘Journey to the Slaughterhouse,’ Harper’s Weekly, Feb. 4, 1860, 72.”58

As this illustration from an 1860 issue of Harper’s Weekly shows, Cincinnati earned a

national reputation for its four-legged pedestrians who clogged the city’s streets in the nineteenth

century. Shortly after its founding, Cincinnati become a key center for meat processing, a

development that led to economic expansion and related negative environmental impact.59 Late eighteenth century New York transplant to Cincinnati, Richard Fosdick, developed a process for preserving pork in barreled brine, making it possible to ship the product long distances and opening the door to the city becoming the first major inland meat packing location in the United

States. The cost of transporting pork to the East dropped when producers were able to transport processed meat rather than live animals. This exponentially increased the number of animals

58 “Journey to the Slaughterhouse,” Harper’s Weekly, Feb. 4, 1860, 72, https://archive.org/details/harpersweeklyv4Bonn. 59 R. Douglas Hurt, “John Cleves Symmes and the Miami Purchase,” in Builders of Ohio: A Biographical History, Warren Van Tine and Michael Pierce, eds. (Ohio State University Press, 2003), 14-25. 43

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farmers herded through Cincinnati’s streets on their way to the slaughterhouses near the

riverfront. The city’s river valley location that promoted growth of a densely-packed urban core,

provided a fertile breeding ground for disease as slaughterhouse discharge was routinely allowed

to flow into the Mill Creek and other Ohio River watershed tributaries.

Yet Cincinnati did not begin as a farming community. Like Pittsburgh, it had been the

site of armed conflict between European troops and Native Americans. The original Fort

Washington was a colonial outpost in the late eighteenth century and was close to where the first

survey map was laid out after the Revolutionary War. In 1788, Israel Ludlow, Robert Patterson,

and Matthias Denman established a settlement on a tract of land Denman purchased from John

Cleves Symmes; that tract, part of a 330,000-acre parcel that Symmes acquired under a

Congressional Land Grant in the Ohio Valley following the American Revolution.60 The three

men originally christened the settlement “Losantiville” which roughly translated to “the village

across from the mouth of the Licking River.”61 Renamed Cincinnati by Northwest Territorial

governor Arthur St. Clair a few years later as tribute to the Revolutionary War veteran’s fraternal

organization, the Society of the Cincinnati, the settlement soon became a hub for westward- bound river travel.62 Outfitters and dry goods merchants, and the warehouses necessary to

replenish them, were quickly erected at regular intervals along the riverfront. Within a

generation, riverboats heading west and south crowded the shoreline and the town grew in both

population and influence.

60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 The Society of the Cincinnati was formed in 1783 by officers of the Continental Army who had served during the American Revolutionary War, and their eldest sons. Named in honor of Roman citizen soldier Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. The Society’s first president was Gen. George Washington. 44

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The City of Cincinnati was incorporated in 1819 and its population nearly doubled during

the 1830s putting a strain on the city’s available housing inventory and its rudimentary public

infrastructure. A devastating flood of the Ohio River in February of 1832 took its toll on

buildings constructed close to the river. Worst of all, however, was the outbreak of cholera that

lasted more than a year (1832-33) and claimed approximately four percent of Cincinnati’s

population.63 At the height of this first major outbreak, Cincinnatians died at the rate of nearly

“forty each day,” hundreds of children lost one parent, nearly as many lost both.64

Whether “Queen of the West” or “Porkopolis,” Cincinnati was hardly an exemplar of

modern sanitary protocols and that reality played a part in the virility of the cholera outbreaks.65

Minor recurrences of cholera hit the city repeatedly following its initial outbreak in 1832-3 but

its reappearance in 1849-50 was devastating. Despite the hazards of life at the vanguard of

western settlement during this period, Cincinnati continued to draw native-born Americans from

the Atlantic coast as well as immigrants, particularly those from German lands.

Despite the economic downturns of the 1890s, the overall trajectory for the city tracked upward. It continued to attract new businesses and new residents, becoming the sixth largest city in the nation by 1850 with a population of more than 115,000 and as late as 1890, it retained its status as the largest city in Ohio, with a population of nearly 300,000.66 Breweries, shipbuilders,

consumer products companies, and manufacturers joined the meatpackers in offering jobs for

63 “History: St. Aloysius Orphan Society,” http://www.staloysiuscincinnati.org/about/history. 64 Ruth C. Carter, “Cincinnatians and Cholera: Attitudes Toward the Epidemics of 1832 and 1849.” Queen City Heritage, (Fall 1992), 37. 65 See Steve C. Gordon, “From Slaughterhouse to Soap-Boiler: Cincinnati’s Meat Packing Industry, Changing Technologies, and the Rise of Mass Production, 1825-1870,” The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, 16:1 (1990), 55-67. 66 “Table 8. Population of 100 Largest Urban Places: 1850,” U.S. Bureau of the Census. https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps/0027tab8.txt; and “Table 12. Population of 100 Largest Urban Places: 1890,” U.S. Bureau of the Census. https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps/0027tab12.txt. 45

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both experienced and newly skilled workers. The standard of living rose for those in the trades

and manufacturing sector, and an increasing number of lawyers, doctors, druggists, and

academics made Cincinnati home. As a result, now prosperous first- and second-generation immigrants relocated to new and affluent suburbs. Many of these original residents of the basin and areas such as Over-the-Rhine moved on to Cincinnati’s Mt. Adams, Mt. Auburn, and

Avondale neighborhoods. Nevertheless, Cincinnati’s economic growth slowed long before that

of Pittsburgh, and even Cleveland. The following map of Cincinnati demonstrates the reality behind Cincinnati’s limitations on growth. Beyond its westernmost rural communities (and the left side of the map), Cincinnati is bounded by the state of Indiana. To the south, it is hemmed in by the Ohio River, here not merely a bifurcation of a city as with the rivers of Pittsburgh, but a boundary between Ohio and the commonwealth of Kentucky.

Fig. 5 – “‘Map of Cincinnati and Suburbs and Covington & Newport,’ ca. 1870, M. & R. Burgheim.”67

67 “Map of Cincinnati and Suburbs: Covington and Newport,” ca. 1870. M. &. R. Burgheim. 46

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With its growth over the nineteenth-century big-city problems including crime, a growing

economic disparity between the very wealthy and the very poor, and the machine politicians with

expertise in political corruption and self-dealing. Conversely, Cincinnatians took advantage of a

blank slate made possible by early, rapid growth to bring culture, literacy, and beauty to the city.

Museums and libraries were built, an orchestra was founded, opera houses staged professional

performances, institutions of higher learning were established, and more than two hundred houses of worship were consecrated.

In its early years, Cincinnati and the surrounding area drew religious practitioners and

reformers of many creeds. The first Methodist class in the Northwest Territory was founded in

Milford, twenty miles to Cincinnati’s northeast, in 1797.68 The city’s first Lutheran

congregation was established in 1814. The first Catholic church was built within the city limits

of Cincinnati under the direction of Fr. (later Bishop) Edward D. Fenwick in 1821.69 German

Methodism was founded in Cincinnati through the ministry of German immigrant Methodist

circuit rider, Wilhelm Nast.70 The first Jewish congregation west of the Allegheny Mountains,

K.K. B’nai Israel, was established in 1824 by English Jewish immigrants, and the American

Reform Movement of Judaism was established and nurtured by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise in

Cincinnati upon his arrival in the 1850s on the heels of emergent Jewish immigration from western Europe.71

By the end of the nineteenth century, there were two Friends Meetings (Quakers), six

African Methodist Episcopal churches, close to sixty Catholic churches, nearly a dozen Jewish

68 “Who We Are” Milford First United Methodist Church. http://www.milfordfirstumc.org/ 69 “A Portrait and a History.” 70 “Wilhelm Nast,” OhioHistoryCentral.org, http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/wilhelm_nast. 71 “Cincinnati,” Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/cincinnati; and “History and Overview of Reform Judaism,” Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-and- overview-of-reform-judaism. 47

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synagogues, and more than 100 churches for Protestant denominations from Baptists, to

Congregationalists, German Evangelical Union, German Reformed, Hollandische Reformed,

Lutherans, Presbyterians (including Reformed and United branches), United Church of Christ,

Seventh Day Adventists, United Brethren in Christ, Union, Universalist, and Unitarian.72

Schools for religious training were established by Catholics, Presbyterians, and Jews in

Cincinnati and the religiously devout exerted efforts, both charitable and doctrinal, for the

benefit of believers. Many of the faiths that found a home in Cincinnati were brought by the

German immigrants who made their way to the United States during the nineteenth century and

it is their dominant impact that is examined in more detail below.

The bulk of the earliest wave of immigration to Cincinnati came from central Europe,

specifically the lands of pre-unification Germany and Cincinnati’s first congregation of

Protestants was founded in 1814, the German Evangelic Lutheran and Reformed Church of St.

John’s. In 1838, a dispute arose between northern and southern German immigrant parishioners over the form of spoken German to be used during liturgical services, resulting in a schism that split the congregation in two.73 Three years after the fracture, St. John’s welcomed a new pastor,

August Kröll, a graduate of the Lutheran University of Giessen in the German territory of Hesse-

Darmstadt. Kröll sought to reunite the German Protestant community and he founded the

German-language newspaper, Die Protestantischen Zeitblätter, which published both general

interest and religious news from 1849 to 1879. This period marked the golden age of German-

language newspaper publishing in the United States. Of the more than 800 such newspapers in

72 “Churches: William’s Cincinnati, Ohio General & Business Directory for 1891, 1923-25, transcribed by Linda Boorom.” RootsWeb.Ancestry.com. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ohhamilt/churches1891.html. 73 Don Heinrich Tolzmann, “Cincinnati’s Third German Protestant Church,” in Don Heinrich Tolzmann, ed. Das Ohiotal – The Ohio Valley: The German Dimension (Peter Lang Publishing Co., 1993), 165-99. 48

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operation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cincinnati had five (Die Ohio

Chronik, Volksblatt, Freie Press, Volksfreund, and Westliche Blätter), in addition to the religious

German language papers (Die Protestantischen Zeitblätter (Protestant), Die Warheitsfreund

(Catholic), and Die Deborah (Jewish).74 In comparison, Cleveland had three German language

newspapers (Waechter und Anzeiger, Echo, and Siebenbűrgison-Amerikanisches Volksblatt) and

Pittsburgh had two (Freiheits-Freund and Pittsburger Volksblatt).

Cincinnati’s German community created a strong social fabric where enclaves of immigrants wove their lives together along religious and cultural lines. German Catholics, Jews, and Protestants immigrated to the United States in waves energized by the push-pull factors of other western and central European immigrant groups. These Germans made their way to

America as early as 1608, but the significant periods of immigration tracked the three major waves of immigration discussed above. The first wavers came for the economic opportunity they believed existed in frontier cities like Cincinnati. They pushed west, settled in the basin, close to the riverfront, within the borders of the city. German “Forty-Eighters” by the tens of thousands fled to the United States and the population of Cincinnati’s German neighborhoods increased in population as a result. The third wave came in the last three decades of the nineteenth century when German unification efforts forced resistors such as Roman Catholics to flee the Bismarck administration during Kulturkampf. Unfortunately, native-born Americans in Cincinnati did not always warmly welcome these new, overwhelmingly Catholic, residents.

Followers of Judaism and both major branches of Christianity established houses of worship, religious primary schools, and institutions for higher learning in the Ohio River Valley.

By the end of the nineteenth century, of the sixty Catholic parishes that had been established in

74 Leah Weinryb Grohsgal, “Chronicling America’s Historic German Newspapers and the Growth of the American Ethnic Press,” National Endowment for the Humanities, Jul. 2, 2014, http://www.neh.gov. 49

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the city of Cincinnati—at least two dozen of them had a heavily or exclusively German-

immigrant parishioner base—and most of these sponsored schools to educate their children from

kindergarten to the eighth grade.75 There were three Catholic colleges: St. Francis Xavier

University, the College of Mount St. Joseph, and Chatfield College, as well as the Athenaeum of

Ohio/Mount Saint Mary’s of the West Seminary, the third oldest Roman-Catholic seminary in

the United States and the oldest west of the Appalachians.76 There were also eleven Jewish

congregations in the city of Cincinnati by 1900, along with Hebrew Union College, and two

Jewish day schools. Protestant denominations accounted for 123 congregations, thirty-four of

which were German, as well as the Presbyterian Lane Seminary.

The Lane Seminary, founded in 1829, was affiliated with the Presbyterian Church and the

Rev. Lyman Beecher became its first president in 1832. Within two years of its opening, the

seminary found itself at the forefront of a national debate on the issue of slavery. The so-called

“Lane Debates of 1834” pitted half the students and a few members of the faculty who were

strongly anti-slavery, against Beecher and the balance of faculty members and students who, while not pro-slavery, sought desperately to tamp down the controversy to retain the seminary’s mainstream financial support among members of the local business community. As a result of

75 The Archdiocese of Cincinnati once included Ohio, Michigan, and part of the Northwest Territories. The number of parishes listed here reflects only those founded before 1930 within the Cincinnati metropolitan area. “Parish Profiles,” RootsWeb.Ancestry.com; and “About Us” CatholicCincinnati.org. http://www.catholiccincinnati.org/about-us-2/a-portrait/. The first bishop of the Cincinnati Diocese, Edward D. Fenwick, oversaw construction of the first Catholic Church in the city at what is now the corner of Liberty and Vine Streets in 1823 and the first Catholic school in 1824. Ibid. The federation of Catholic schools in Cincinnati is still the ninth largest in the country. During the period of this study, the Archdiocese operated dozens of schools in keeping with the Second Provincial Council of Cincinnati’s exhortation to which: “.…all pastors of souls are bound, under pain of mortal sin, to provide a Catholic school in every parish or congregation subject to them, where this can be done; and in order that each Ordinary may know what are the parishes in which this obligation exists, they decree that the Tridentine Law, s. XXII, c. IX, is to be practically enforced….” Rev. J. A. Burns, The Growth and Development of the Catholic School System in the United States (Benziger Brothers, 1912), 186. 76“History,” The Athenaeum of Ohio/Mount St. Mary’s Seminary, https://www.athenaeum.edu/Discover.History.aspx. 50

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the conflict, the pro-abolition students, known as the “Lane Rebels,” withdrew from the

seminary. They were later admitted by Oberlin College, an institution of higher education in

Oberlin, Ohio that was at the forefront of social reform vis-à-vis the admission of African

American and women students.

Cincinnati’s Germans clung to their faith as well as to the physical manifestations of their cultural identity: food, drink, dancing, and song. These associations of an earthly nature were important to many German immigrants and crossed religious confessional lines as binding agents for broader community cohesiveness in pursuit of the brotherhood borne of national origins.

Such voluntary associations became a critical feature of American life across cultural and economic boundaries, not only among first- and second-generation immigrant communities, and they were a key factor that contributed to the social fabric of Cincinnati in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, these voluntary cultural associations sometimes ran headlong into nativist resistance.

Predominantly German immigration to Cincinnati in the mid- to late-nineteenth century left a distinct Germanic imprint on the cultural identity of the city even as the population continued to expand. A few generations later, Cincinnati was surpassed in size and diversity by the city of Cleveland, originally settled by a small group of New England surveyors but bolstered

by a broader European-based immigration that chose the city on the shores of Lake Erie as its

home. It was an unexpected development, inasmuch as the population growth in opening decades of Cleveland settlement was undistinguished.

Cleveland

Founded in 1796 by Moses Cleaveland of Connecticut and his party who were surveying

the Western Reserve, the village was slow to attract new residents until the mid-1830s.

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Cleaveland had long since returned to Connecticut when the village was incorporated as the City

of Cleveland in 1836.77 As river-borne transportation fed the growth of Pittsburgh and

Cincinnati, the completion of the Erie Canal to the Ohio River in 1832 helped to bring businesses and opportunity-seekers to Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. By 1840, with a population of more

than 6,000, Cleveland was the forty-fifth largest city in the nation and that growth brought

challenges along with opportunity. In 1851, the recently completed Cleveland, Columbus, and

Cincinnati Railroad opened service along the entirety of its line. Cleveland newspaper editors

tended to blame the arrival of the railroad for the elevation of the city’s social ills including

increased crime and indigence.78

Fig. 6 – “City of Cleveland Ethnic Settlements, ca. 1923.”79

77 It appears that the city followed the lead of local newspaper, the Cleveland Advertiser, which had dropped the “a” in Cleaveland to save room on the paper’s masthead. 78 Michael J. McTighe, “Leading Men, True Women, Protestant Churches, and the Shape of Antebellum Benevolence,” in Cleveland: A Tradition of Reform, ed. David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski (Kent State University Press, 1986), 13 and see Catherine Boland Erkkila, “American Railways and the Cultural Landscape of Immigration,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journey of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, 22:1, (Spring 2015), 35-62. 79 “City of Cleveland Ethnic Settlements, ca. 1923,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, https://case.edu/ech/media/caseedu/encyclopedia-of-cleveland-history/images/image-gallery/I01.gif. 52

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As the map above indicates, Cleveland’s founders may have been predominantly Protestant New

Englanders, but its immigrant influx was considerably more diverse: Germans, Bohemians, the

Irish, and Hungarians were among the dominant nationalities between 1874 and 1890. From

1890 to 1907, they were joined by large groups of Italians and Slavic peoples, and the final

immigrant push after 1908 came with the arrival of several thousand eastern Europeans.80 These

immigrants carried a strong desire to maintain their national identity by settling among those

with similar memories of familiar ethnic or national traditions, and especially among those who

were their co-religionists. There were Catholics, Jews, and Protestants of many denominations,

who clustered together in ethnic enclaves similar in number and diversity to those of Pittsburgh

but more numerous than those found in Cincinnati. The map above indicates the location of the

city’s ethnic enclaves nearing the end of the nation’s open immigration period.

Ascendant during the first several generations of Cleveland’s settlement, white New

England Protestants began to yield more territory, geographically, and spiritually, to Catholic

and Jewish immigrants throughout the balance of the nineteenth century and beginning of the

twentieth. It is not that the Protestant branch of Christianity remained static, it also endured a

diversification of its ranks. The majority of the city’s early Protestant churches were led by

Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, and the Episcopalians who established

Trinity Episcopal Church, Cleveland’s first organized religious body, in 1816.81 With the arrival of a sizeable number of European immigrants and free blacks beginning in the early 1830s, came

Protestants from denominations outside of the initial circle of New England-based congregations.

80 “Immigration to Cleveland by Country of Origin,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University, https://case.edu/ech/articles/i/immigration-and-migration/immigration-to-cleveland- by-country-of-origin/#d.en.290655. 81 Michael J. McTighe and Jimmy E. W. Meyer, “Religion,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University, http://case.edu/ech/articles/r/religion. 53

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African Americans founded St. John’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1830 and German

Protestants founded Schifflein Christi (the “Little Boat of Christ”) in 1834.82 In step with other similarly situated cities, Cleveland dealt with these growing challenges of pluralism from the conservative base of its founding in Protestant churches somewhat hesitantly.83

While Cleveland’s religious communities each approached the broader diversification differently, Protestant churches chose to establish mission outposts in areas of the city where there was no prior Protestant presence. They came to enthusiastically endorse the ideas that were later identified with settlement house services and offered vocational training, English language classes, and recreational opportunities for newly-arrived immigrants.84 In addition, the

Protestant community’s historical grounding in religious reform was marked by a temperament that supported a “network of voluntary organizations dedicated to temperance … abolitionism, welfare/relief, (and) orphans.”85 Historian Kenneth W. Rose argues that

between the 1850s and 1930, a constant, shifting struggle emerged as the city’s Anglo- American middle- and upper-classes struggled to enforce and maintain moral and social discipline in a city populated by growing numbers of European immigrants, many of whom were Catholics and Jews. Religion and ethnicity were thus tied together and anti- Catholicism and antisemitism were important aspects in Cleveland and the rest of America.86

Cleveland’s Protestant community also produced the politicians who were the early drivers of city government into the twentieth century and they were challenged daily to find a balance between their faith and their politics.87 This marriage between civil authority and

82 Ibid. 83 “Cleveland,” The Pluralism Project, Harvard University. http://pluralism.org/landscape/cleveland. 84 McTighe and Meyer. 85 Ibid. 86 Kenneth W. Rose, “Ethnic and Race Relations,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University, http://case.edu/ech/articles/e/ethnic-and-race-relations. 87 “Private benevolent efforts directed toward the poor and children persisted and were allied with public efforts in the years before the Civil War because both grew out of the concerns of an essentially Protestant 54

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religious practice imbued social reform movements in Protestant Cleveland with the weight of

secular validation.88 Nevertheless, elected officials were not the only residents who took an interest in the welfare of Cleveland’s immigrant and native-born population. Women like

Rebecca Cromwell Rouse, a practicing Baptist, was the instigator behind the Martha Washington and Dorcas Society founded in 1843 as Cleveland’s first organization to assist the poor. Rouse and the society will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.

***

Cities within the same geographic regions share at least superficial traits. Nonetheless, they also possess distinct community narratives that set them apart from one another. This is true of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Cleveland today, and it was true a century ago. The maturing of a city’s character, and the dynamic of its interaction with its residents, whether they are native-

born or voluntary immigrants, were dependent on a significant number of factors. These included

elements such as geography and natural resources, neighborhood development, demographic

differences (i.e., race, ethnicity, and religion), the economic foundation and depths of socio-

economic disparity, educational opportunities, cultural expressions and availability, as well as

those considerations that impacted the overall health and wellbeing of citizens. Although

Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Cleveland attained city status by the third decade of the nineteenth

century, each began at a different point on the continuum of subjugating the nineteenth-century

American frontier.

Until the conclusion of the European colonial period with the founding of the United

States, Pittsburgh was already a prized location, the object of repeated military campaigns

group which functioned as a leadership elite both in voluntary societies and in the city at large.” McTighe, “Leading Men,” 23. 88 Ibid. 55

24:11 between French and English forces and their native allies. Cincinnati, further removed into the

Northwest Territory, also began life as a military garrison, but quickly found its calling as a jumping off point for western travel on the Ohio River. Their neighbor to the north, Cleveland, was founded as a quiet outpost on Lake Erie for those wishing to settle the open territory beyond

“crowded” New England. The circumstances under which these cities were founded and grew is important to understanding the ways in which their citizens looked to solve community problems. The particular combinations of the percentages of the nationalities of immigrant newcomers, the faiths they practiced, their vocations, their desires for access to cultural and educational opportunities (including the importance they assigned to making those desires a reality), and their predisposition to charitable giving, whether of time, money, or both, especially for the most vulnerable, were unique to the cities themselves. Through this study, we will see that what worked in Cleveland, for example, may have run counter to community sentiments in

Cincinnati or Pittsburgh. The common variable in our assessment of each of these cities and their child-saving efforts then was the community response to the proposed policies of Progressivism and professionalization. How did immigrant and religious communities in these three cities interact with members of the middle class who claimed to know best how to manage the process of reform? Who decided which orphans were worth retrieving from the pile of abandoned children and taught to become responsible contributing members of the city proper?

Orphaned children are not a development of the Progressive Era, the Industrial Age, or the age of European exploration and colonization of North America. Children have been intentionally abandoned or tossed to the world by fate when parents died as a result of disease, or violence, throughout all of human history. The outcomes for these unfortunate little ones have run the gamut from purposeful death from infanticide, death by disease or neglect, slavery,

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indenture, institutional care, foster homes, and being adopted into loving families. In antiquity,

orphans were the responsibility of the citizenry or religious community. If they were old enough

to be useful in labor, they earned their keep. The fate of children too young to be put to work was

not so clear. In the Middle Ages and during the European Renaissance, the Catholic Church

established foundling hospitals. These first institutions were vehicles for humane separation for

birth mothers who were unable to care for their children, ostensibly to try to give the baby a chance at life that the mother was unable to provide. The reality was that no one was left

unburdened by that decision. Early Modern European municipalities established orphan asylums

that served as permanent homes for children when necessary and as temporary shelters for

children as parents lost sources of income, to be reclaimed when family fortunes improved. The

Modern Era, and the post-Reformation reconfiguration of the Christian faith brought the

development of a modern institution where children were not only fed, housed, and clothed, but

also educated. This modernization effort was transmitted to the United States in the eighteenth

century along folkways by immigrants seeking religious freedom.

The United States was established upon the ideas of European Enlightenment thinkers realized by explorers and adventurers, frontiersman and farmers, intellectuals and implementers.

They brought with them ideas from their ancestral lands and transformed them to suit America’s moral sensibilities. These ideas were not represented by some national American monolith but were interpreted through regional customs and traditions based on economic, ethnic, and religious factors. Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh are typical of cities of the Midwest in that they reached their peak growth and development in the era of significant internal migration and mass immigration, building their urban bona fides through the efforts of old-line families and new residents. How these cities dealt with the issues of dependent child welfare has much to say

24:11 about the cities themselves. How they faced the challenges to their community efforts at child welfare were impacted by national efforts to transform child saving and child welfare during the

Era.

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Chapter 2 Disrupting the Status Quo or Introducing Order? Bosses, Progressives, Social Gospelers, and the New Philanthropy

You often hear people speaking as if life was like striving upward toward a mountain peak. That is not so. Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on the one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other.

Theodore Roosevelt1

In his speech to the students and faculty at the Groton School in the spring of 1904, President

Theodore Roosevelt made an emphatic point about being purposeful in following the path before you. The occasion for the president’s speech was the annual commencement of the private school founded in 1884, that was affiliated with the Episcopal Church.2 Roosevelt advised those

in attendance that the future was not about Sisyphean efforts to push a rock up the mountain, or

even to reach the mountain’s peak, but to keep to the path where progress is made without falling

into old habits of inefficiency (the bane of Progressivism) or wickedness (the enemy of middle-

class America’s sense of moral authority). In this early twentieth century oratory, Roosevelt

hoped to reach the next generation of American leaders, to share with them his vision for what

was required of them to stay along the ridgeline. American futures depended on their ability to

find and maintain the right balance.

1 Theodore Roosevelt, May 24, 1904, Address at the Groton School. Theodore Roosevelt Collection. MS Am 1454.50 (138), Harvard College Library. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital- Library/Record?libID=o285148. 2 The campus of the Groton School, a private school for eighth to twelfth grade, rests in a bucolic valley just north of Worcester, Massachusetts. The school’s motto “Cui Sevire Est Regnare” was adopted from the Book of Common Prayer. Originally translated “To Serve is to Rule,” the school has since adopted the alternate translation “For Whom Service is Perfect Freedom.” The Groton School. http://www.groton.org/about. 59

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A half-century later, Stanton Belfour, director and secretary of the Pittsburgh Foundation,

delivered a speech to the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. His presentation,

distinguished for its long reach into antiquity to describe the beginnings of charity, took special

note of the paradigm shift that occurred when philanthropic control moved from wealthy donors

to Progressive reformers and bureaucrats:

The antecedents of the philanthropic foundation are Biblical, Greek, Roman, Medieval, and Elizabethan …Their elements were now molded to new purposes by the rapid expansion of productive power and wealth in the United States in the late nineteenth century. These factors were combined with the widespread belief in the idea of progress and the American dream to create a new social vision, as well as a new gospel and method of philanthropy … The new vision was that, armed with the tools of science and the knowledge they would uncover, men might hope to cure both human and social evils at their source. The new gospel was that the true function of philanthropy lay, not in palliative relief, but in pursuing this new vision.3

Who were the apostles of this new gospel and what was the new vision of their philanthropy?

What were the tools of science and knowledge to be uncovered in the search to alleviate the ills

that plagued society? Belfour hinted at the proponents of the Social Gospel, with their

“widespread belief in the ideas of progress and the American dream to create a new social vision,

as well as a new gospel and method of philanthropy.” 4 Those efforts struck a chord, principally

with liberal Protestants, but also among some Jews and Catholics. He asserted that the method of

charitable giving changed in response to the new vision of Progressivism. In his reference to

tools of science, he also linked that change in early-twentieth-century philanthropic efforts to

Social Darwinism and social engineering, at best, dubious intellectual movements, that

3 Stanton Belfour, “Pittsburgh’s Philanthropic Tradition” (speech, delivered to the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Mar. 22, 1954) reprinted in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies (Summer 1954), 99, Pennsylvania State University, https://journals.psu.edu/2459-article_text. 4 Ibid. 60

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nevertheless found supporters across American society.5 There were economists, such as

William Graham Sumner, and supporters of eugenics such as John D. Rockefeller, Alexander

Graham Bell, and Theodore Roosevelt, who subscribed to at least some of the tenets of Social

Darwinism.

This chapter is focused on factors that altered the political and social status quo. First, it

examines the missteps of Gilded Age political power brokers who drew the unsympathetic attention of Progressive political reformers broadly across the nation, as well as in the cities of this study, and how that attention drove changes in municipal governance. Dismantling political machines were often at the top of reformers’ to-do lists. In this regard, it is important to note the observations of urban historian Jon C. Teaford on American municipal government at the end of the nineteenth century. He was among the first to recognize that, “a bright side of the municipal endeavor did …. exist. American city governments could claim grand achievements [and some] urban leaders won some creditable victories in the struggle for improved services.”6

Teaford decries the type of historical account which saw only the binary of “bad”

politicians versus “good” reformers, that “obscured the complexities of municipal rule and the

diversity of elements actually vying for power … [accepting] as axiomatic the inadequacy of the

formal municipal structure. Critics have trumpeted its failures, while its triumphs have gone

unheralded.”7 To which I would add my own observations. It is easier to be a theater critic than a

playwright. The modus operandi of the Progressive Era reformer extraordinaire, the efficiency

expert, was to criticize what he could not have created, because such experts view processes and

5 See, for example, J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1915 (Yale University Press, 2000) and Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Anchor, 2007). 6 Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 4. 7 Ibid. 61

24:11 problems in a vacuum. They are not expected to do the work, they just have to criticize those who do, imposing theoretical solutions on the real world problems, and fault find when the solutions sometimes fail. Reform did not always produce the consequences intended by its men and women of action.

This chapter also focuses on the development of the Social Gospel movement and the common ground that Progressive reformers found with Social Gospelers, including shared views on the social consequences of poverty, immorality, ignorance, and disease. Finally, it assesses a common affinity for social science and the theory of Social Darwinism that attributed societal maladies to differences in socioeconomic strata, race, ethnicity, and creed. Throughout the

Progressive Era, individuals who identified strongly with the era’s reform virtues understood that the framework of a strong central government was the most productive way to advance their agenda. They believed, as economist Thomas C. Leonard noted in his essay on the political economy of the Progressive Era, in: “social efficiency…the epistemic and moral authority of science … (to) explain and control human inheritance … intellectuals [who] should guide social and economic progress … (and) their faith in planning, organization, and command.”8

Progressives forsook the economic and social individualism of the first century of the American political and economic system in favor of one where educated professionals took responsibility for control of a model American society.

For men and women of action, these were not jobs to be delegated but to be undertaken as personal causes. Traversing the crest of the ridge required balance and bravado, and the idea of failure never occurred to true Progressive reformers who saw themselves as agents of change.

8 Thomas C. Leonard, “American Economic Reform in the Progressive Era: Its Foundational Beliefs and Their Relation to Eugenics,” History of Political Economy, 41:1, 109-41 quoted in Leonard, “Religion and Evolution in Progressive Era Political Economy: Adversaries or Allies?” History of Political Economy, 43:3 (2011), 430. 62

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Self-serving politicians who had controlled the Gilded Age’s rapidly expanding cities might have recognized that they were conspicuous atop most lists of reform targets. But these power brokers did not realize that the Progressives who succeeded them were determined and patient. The ones who rose to the pinnacle of American power, those such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow

Wilson, were skilled at playing the long game. Their idea was to transform the system while maintaining its basic structure. To respond more radically meant burning the system to the ground, in effect, jumping headlong into the gulf of inefficiency. That was an idea with its appeal to anarchists like Emma Goldman, and socialists like Eugene V. Debs, but counterproductive in an American system that relied to some extent on tradition.

The public clamor for reforms at the state and municipal levels shared momentum with the process of political authority centralizing at the federal level, but not everyone decried

“bossism.” Though their vices were numerous, these bosses provided stability that contributed to the efficient operation of the city.9 Nevertheless, the tenacious corruption of machine politics, where the allegiance of those in power was for sale to any corporate concern or wealthy family willing to pay for the privilege, found itself in increasingly unfriendly territory. Across the nation, cities embarked on reform programs that hindered back-slapping machine mayors who extended one hand in warm greeting as they picked supporters’ pockets with the other. It did not hurt reformers’ agendas that they could claim supporters with deep pockets along with supporters in the middle class. Eventually, telephone calls to former city hall insiders rang to disconnected numbers, but not everyone had been cut out of the circle of influence.

9 Alan Lessoff and James J. Connolly, “From Political Insult to Political Theory: The Boss, the Machine, and the Pluralist City,” Journal of Policy History, 25:2 (2013), 146. 63

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Fig. 7 – “John Fergus O’Hea, ‘The Professor,’ Evening Telegraph (Dublin, Ireland), ca. 1912.”10

By the time the cartoon above appeared in connection with Woodrow Wilson’s run for

the presidency, the archetype of Gilded Age machine politicians democrat William M. “Boss”

Tweed of New York City, had long since been removed from office and jailed, yet the specter of

Tweed’s criminality and hubris remained a viable bogeyman for municipal reformers. During his

tenure as Grand Sachem of the Order of Tammany, Tweed built a system of patronage,

corruption, and cronyism that eventually launched him into the city’s mayor’s office. With the

help of underlings, he raided New York’s municipal piggy bank for years in amounts estimated

in the aggregate of between $45,000,000 at the low end and as much as $200,000,000 on the

high side. No less spectacular in his fall than in his rise, Tweed was finally undone by the

combined efforts of a spurned minion with a second set of accounting ledgers, reporting from

The New York Times, and pointed images from political cartoonist Thomas Nast, then publishing

with Harper’s Weekly. After a ballyhooed escape from incarceration, and eventual recapture,

10 “The Professor,” John Fergus O’Hea, Evening Telegraph (Dublin, Ireland), ca. 1912, Presidential Campaigns: A Cartoon History, Indiana University Bloomington, www.iu.edu. Also see Zane L. Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (1968) (Ohio State University Press: 2001). 64

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Tweed died in prison in 1878. On a less malignant scale, the maneuverings of political machines in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh made them locally, even regionally notorious.11 Bosses were not exclusive to one political party, with republicans and democrats equally adept at manning the helm of the machine. While Democrats controlled the majority of the nation’s political machines, in these Midwestern cities, they were dominated by members of the Grand

Old Party.

Cincinnati

Cincinnati’s George “Boss” Cox relished his reputation for commanding the city’s political works. Renowned for his ability to reach across the political aisle, Cox began his career as a twenty-four-year-old ward boss determined to fight the heavy-handed control of city services by a few wealthy, well-connected men of Cincinnati’s political class. Yet, at the height of his influence, Cox joined the side of those he originally sought to unseat, armed with the power to make or break those who sought higher office both at the local and state levels. His track record of kingmaking was remarkable for its success, and he held tightly to the reins of local political power for nearly three decades. He was as smart and savvy as you might expect a political boss to be, but according to historian Zane L. Miller, he was also sensitive to the needs of his various constituents. He was adroit at finding common ground where others only saw minefields.12

11 Several monographs take account of the deep historiography of regional political bossism including: Orville D. Menard, Political Bossism in Mid-America (University Press of America, 1989); James Duane Bolin, Bossism and Reform in a Southern City, Lexington, KY, 1880-1940 (University of Kentucky Press, 2000); Henry Collier Wright, Bossism in Cincinnati (Forgotten Books, 2017); Jessica Trounstine, Political Monopolies in American Cities: The Rise and Fall of Bosses and Reformers (University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (Little Brown and Company, 2001). 12 Zane L. Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (1968) (Ohio State University Press, 2000). 65

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By way of comparison to the criminality of other machine bosses, historian David

Stradling argues, “Cincinnati wasn't necessarily as corrupt as … New York and other big cities.

It was not that they were irresponsible. Instead, it spoke to their utter control of the system.”13

When George Cox’s influence waned, he stepped aside. Unlike Tweed and others whose behavior justified criminal prosecution, Boss Cox had committed no crime. He exerted influence and power that routinely, but not exclusively, meant Republican control in Cincinnati. With a groundswell of support from Cincinnati’s citizens in 1924, the city dealt a stunning blow to the strong-mayor form of city government and adopted a city-manager run municipal structure that relegated the role of mayor to a mostly ceremonial one. Citizens approved dramatic changes to the city’s charter that lasted into the twenty-first century. Domination of municipal power in the hands of a few was also the practice in Cleveland in the Gilded Age, but it too spawned reformers who challenged the political machine.14

Cleveland

Cleveland’s boss politicians of the Gilded Age rarely sought the mayor’s office, preferring to wield power from city council chambers or official party headquarters. Brothers-in- law Harry Bernstein and Herman Finkle, and Finkle’s mentor Maurice Maschke, were critical cogs in the city’s republican political machine in the early twentieth century. Whether building support for their party’s candidates or holding office themselves, these men were viewed early in their careers as “ruthless … (and) corrupt.”15 For decades they delivered victories for their

13 David Stradling quoted in Joel M. Beall, “Why Boss Cox was a Cincinnati Icon,” Cincinnati.com, Feb. 26, 2015, https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/history/2015/02/26/george-cox-boss- cincinnati/24057179/. 14 Shelton Stromquist, “The Crucible of Class: Cleveland Politics and the Origin of Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era, Journal of Urban History, 23:2 (Jan. 1997), 192-220. 15 “Herman Finkle,” MS 3385, Box 1, Citizens League of Greater Cleveland Records, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio (WRHS). 66

24:11 candidates at local and state levels and in typical boss style, demonstrated little concern for the lack of respectability, or legality, in how they accomplished their goals. The prize was always worth the methods used to achieve it. During the Progressive Era, Cleveland became a primary focus of the Home Rule movement in Ohio. Home Rule sought to wrest the power to decide how cities ran their day-to-day business from state control and place it at the community level, with the idea that local was more accountable.16

Voters across Ohio approved Home Rule in 1914 by a 3-to-2 margin and the transformation unlocked political offices that had previously been held within the tightly closed circle of a few men of influence. Home Rule allowed cities to write municipal charters, which in turn, had the potential to weaken machine control by incorporating reforms that included city managers and civil service exams for employment. Finkle, who had been the subject of numerous recall efforts by the Cleveland Citizens League early in his 35-year tenure as a city councilmember, instead ended his time in office with a glowing tribute from the league that recognized his efforts as a “respectable political leader.”17 An ironic twist to political self- interest proved to be an irresistible force as those in power suddenly found respect for accountability, and that fact alone rehabilitated at least a few bosses. The change ushered in progressive mayors like Newton D. Baker, whose meteoric political rise later included serving as

Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of War. He possessed the reformer spirit and worked to position

Cleveland to take advantage of its burgeoning manufacturing base and immigrant-laden working-class population while instituting meaningful municipal reform.18

16 Norman Blume, “Municipal Home Rule in Ohio: The New Look,” Case Western Reserve Law Review, 11:4 (Sep. 1960), 538-60. 17 Ibid. 18 Judah Rubenstein and Jane Avner. Merging Traditions: Jewish Life in Cleveland (Kent State University Press, 2004). 67

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Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh’s political machine, known to locals as the “Ring,” followed a path similar to

the machines of Cincinnati and Cleveland. Owing to the city’s size and national importance

economically, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens made Pittsburgh a focus of his righteous

pen on municipal dysfunction. Conversely, Cincinnati and Cleveland escaped an examination in

Steffens’ series on urban corruption originally published in McClure’s Magazine, and later

collected in an anthology titled The Shame of Cities (1904):

Minneapolis was an example of police corruption; St. Louis of financial …. Pittsburg (sic) is an example of both …. The two other cities have found each an official who has exposed them. Pittsburg (sic) has had no such man and no exposure. The city has been described physically as "Hell with the lid off"; politically it is that same with the lid on. I am not going to lift the lid.19

Two of Steffens’ previous city profiles credited St. Louis and Minneapolis with producing a

homegrown man of integrity to stand up on behalf of fellow citizens and put things right,

whether the problem was police corruption as in Minneapolis, or financial corruption as in St.

Louis. In Pittsburgh, Steffens found both types of corruption, and yet argued that no one was

willing to come forward in the city and make things better. In his critique of Pittsburgh, Steffens

detailed the rise of Christopher L. Magee, a native-born American and talented political

maneuverer who appreciated that the way to control the system was to infiltrate it legally and

then mold its structure from within to suit his purposes.20 The city’s 1816 charter had established

ultimate control of city government via a series of council committees. So Magee set out to

19 Lincoln Steffens, “Pittsburg: A City Ashamed: The Story of a Citizens' Party That Broke Through One Ring into Another,” McClure’s Magazine (May 1903), reprinted in The Shame of the Cities (1904) (Morrisville: Adansonia Press/Lulu Press, 2014), 56-73. . In 1891, in the opening decade of the Progressive Era, Pittsburgh dropped the “h” from its name in 1891 to fall in line with U.S. Geographic Board place name standardization. It reversed the removal in 1911 under public pressure. “The Pittsburgh ‘H.’” VisitPittsburgh.com. http://www.visitpittsburgh.com. 20 Steffens. 68

24:11 become the de facto council boss, with little real resistance possible from either a statutorily weak mayor or from the committee chairs that he handpicked.21 Magee and his lieutenant,

William Flinn, dominated city politics for much of the Gilded Age and their influence survived

Magee’s 1901 death. When Steffens conducted interviews for his Pittsburgh essay two years after Magee’s passing, people railed against the Ring, but not its leader:

If I asked, ‘What kind of a man was Magee?’ they would cool and say, ‘Chris? Chris was one of the best men God ever made.’ If I smiled, they would say, ‘That is all right. You smile, and you can go ahead and show up the ring. You may describe this town as the worst in the country. But you get Magee wrong and you'll have all Pittsburg up in arms.’22

Like bosses in other cities, Magee had developed a patronage system that allowed him to stay simultaneously connected to the needs of working-class voters as well as those within the power structure of the city. Magee had supporters throughout the city and until his passing, no one was willing to bite his generous hand. As a result, Steffens held out little hope for the rehabilitation of Pittsburgh politicians and the revival of civic pride among its citizens: “The

Pittsburgers know, and a strong minority of them care; they have risen against their Ring and beaten it, only to look about and find another ring around them. Angry and ashamed, Pittsburg is a type of the city that has tried to be free and failed.”23 As if to prove Steffens’ prescience, within a decade, Pittsburgh tried again to free itself from machine politics. Members of the city’s elite and professional classes, chiefly those affiliated with the Civic Club and the Voter’s League, began to work toward a complete reconfiguration of city government, replacing the existing ward system that was susceptible to boss control, with city-wide representation.24 Changes that

21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Samuel Hays, “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 55:4 (Oct. 1964), 160, 163. 69

24:11 germinated at the community level eventually became part of a state mandate, yet working-class

Pittsburghers merely traded political control by the Ring, for that of control by the upper-middle class and elites who dominated more than seventy percent of the council seats into the 1930s.25

Despite the negative factors associated with machine control of cities, bosses, whether they occupied the mayor’s chair or stood in the shadows behind it, often also had a surprisingly positive impact on the lives of urban dwellers. They found ways to offer basic city services, such as removing garbage and waste from roadways, that those whose hands were tied by the rules of burgeoning bureaucracies proved unable to match. These bosses garnered very public appreciation for getting the job done on the one hand, even as they tolerated the gambling and prostitution that contaminated the city’s neighborhoods with the other. Bosses were often personally charming and insinuated themselves within the communities of working-class voters where the strength of their popularity acted as at least a temporary shield against usurpation.26

Had they been able to ignore the corruption and criminality, Progressive reformers might have admired the machine politicians’ efficiency in getting the job done.

Proponents of the Social Gospel movement sought to harness the power of Christian ethics to solve society’s problems, and the Progressive movement welcomed, in some measure, their moral clarity. There are many well-known names of the Progressive Era tied to the movement: settlement house founder Jane Addams, politician William Jennings Bryan, and evangelist the Rev. Billy Sunday, for example. Issues of social justice were the primary concern of Social Gospelers and there was an overlap of most of these issues with the Progressive Era’s reform agenda, including alcoholism, racial tension, economic inequality, child labor, and prison

25 Ibid. 26 Jeremy C. Young, The Age of Charisma: Leaders, Followers, and Emotions in American Society, 1870- 1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 4-5. 70

24:11 reform. Two Protestant ministers, Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, were essential to its founding vision and the discipleship of the Social Gospel. Gladden was responsible for conceiving and preaching the movement’s foundational beliefs, while

Rauschenbusch was able to successfully articulate its theology both in person and in print.

From his adolescence as a fallen away Calvinist, and training as a Congregationalist minister at Williams College in Massachusetts, Gladden developed a belief that humanity did not have to await the Kingdom of God in the hereafter, but that it needed to realize that goal in the present day.27 In 1882, Gladden was the newly installed minister of the First Congregational

Church of Columbus, Ohio with a congregation that met directly across the street from Ohio’s statehouse. The pews were filled every week with the solidly middle-class families and professional politicians and businessmen who were ready to hear the message Gladden delivered on the power of Christ to cure the world’s ills. His appeal to the congregation was multifaceted:

“The Kingdom of God is here, it has not to be awaited, it has come. Already it is taking possession of every department of human life … as every man learns to do habitually the loving thing.”28 He continued along this path, “Love is the only law, its force is irresistible; it solves all social problems,” with a message that came at the height of economic uncertainty following the

Depression of 1893 and just before the Panic of 1896 and its implication struck a positive chord.29

27 An early use of the term “fallen away” as applied to a lack of religious observance or apostasy came from Christian minister Charles Haddon Spurgeon. See Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Spurgeon’s Sermons, Vol. 2, 1856 (Devoted Publishing, 2017), 19. 28 Washington Gladden, “Introduction by Henry Stauffer, ed.” The Great Awakening in Columbus, Ohio, under the Labors of Rev. B. Fay Mills and His Associates (Columbus, 1895), 6 quoted in Boyer, “An Ohio Leader of the Social Gospel Movement: Reassessing Washington Gladden,” Ohio History, 116 (2009), 95. 29 Ibid. 71

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When two of the nation’s most visible companies, the National Cordage Company and

the Philadelphia Reading Railroad collapsed in 1893, panic hit the stock market.30 The negative

effects that cascaded through the banking system led to many other companies being forced into

bankruptcy. Unemployment rates soared, especially among industrial workers. The Panic of

1896 followed as bank failures continued, complicated by a drop in the silver reserve. It took the

presidential election of 1896 that ushered William McKinley into the White House after his

defeat of William Jennings Bryan, to stop the slide.31 Those who sat in the pews of Gladden’s

church heard two sermons every Sunday, one in the morning and a second one in the evening.

During these sermons he spoke often of “moral evolution” where believers needed to worry less

about original sin and more about the sins of the present.32 In a sermon on the Atonement, for

example, Gladden argued that “Christ bore our sins in fellowship with us, not in substitution for

us.”33 In his view, Christians carried a continuing shared responsibility to one another and to

God for the state of humanity; not all could be turned over to God to manage. Gladden also “…

placed significant emphasis on the ethical teachings as central and normative for Christian faith

and experience with the Sermon on the Mount at the center of his teachings on how to live a

Christian life.”34 His sermon was a call to action for his congregants and his message was that

30 National Cordage was founded in 1887. By 1890, it had purchased three of its largest competitors. Rapid growth and mismanagement of funds led the company to financial disaster. “A Cordage Combination,” The New York Times (New York, New York), Sep. 3, 1887, 8; Arthur S. Downy, A History of the National Cordage Company with a Supplement Containing Copies of Important Documents (1913) (Forgotten Books: 2013); “The National Cordage Company,” Wall Street Journal (New York, New York), Oct. 9, 1890, 1; “National Cordage’s Insolvency,” Wall Street Journal (New York, New York), May 5, 1893, 1; and “National Cordage Co.,” Wall Street Journal (New York, New York), Aug. 24, 1891, 4. 31 Douglas Steeples and David O. Whitten, Democracy in Desperation: The Depression of 1893 (Praeger Publishing, 1998). 32 Rev. Timothy C. Ahrens, Speech, “Washington Gladden: Prophet of Truth and Justice,” Del. Oct. 1, 2011, The First Congregational Church, http://www.first-church.org. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 72

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Christ did not want passive followers, but instead those willing to stand with him to bring change to the world. Unlike most Christian clerics of his day, however, Gladden believed that

Christianity was not the only path to God.35 His was a simple message that drew in many who had struggled to find equilibrium amidst rapid social change.

Gladden’s doctrine of the Social Gospel movement was an outgrowth of liberal American

Protestantism that “focused on the sins of society, such as poverty and inequality.”36 It also differed from mainstream American Protestantism that sought salvation of the individual rather than the wholesale salvation of mankind. Far from an appeal to Christians to impose his utopian vision, Gladden offered practical suggestions for methods to move toward desired social goals such as: shortening the work day, banning child labor, limiting the autonomy of public utilities, and urging companies to develop programs for sharing company profits among all employees, not just those in the executive suite.37 Despite Gladden’s heartfelt sermons and the popularity of his published works, the movement remained somewhat on the periphery of both evangelical

Christianity and social reform. That changed with Walter Rauschenbusch.

Rauschenbusch, the son of German immigrants, studied church history in preparation for the ministry at the Rochester (New York) Theological Seminary. His beliefs in the presence of heaven on Earth, in the here and now, harmonized with those of Gladden: “The Kingdom of God is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven” and the marriage of Christianity and the secular world in social welfare endeavors.38 The primary lens through which Rauschenbusch filtered his thoughts was theohistorical rather than purely theological. Instead of studying history to understand the

35 Ibid. 36 Boyer, “An Ohio Leader of the Social Gospel Movement,” 95. 37 Ibid., 95. 38 Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (MacMillan, 1907), 65. 73

24:11 relation of human events to each other, he studied history to look for traces of God’s intervention in those events.39 Rauschenbusch believed deeply in the most important principles of Christian dogma: salvation through Christ, Christ as the prophesied Messiah, as well as the Holy Trinity, but he cared little for what he saw as preoccupation with focus on the supernatural. His belief that the Kingdom of God called on Christians to “establish a more just social order,” fueled his motivation to spread these ideas.40

Rauschenbusch was a man of his times, influenced not only by his faith, but by his this- worldly education. He spent two years studying Kantian idealism in Berlin, as well as contemporary development of scientific evolutionary thought and the American reincarnation of the ethical and religious system of personalism that holds to the primacy of a person’s soul.41 In the late nineteenth century, many American intellectuals-in-training pursued their post- baccalaureate studies in Europe, often in Germany, which enjoyed a global reputation as the scholarly epicenter of the West. They returned with what historian Daniel T. Rodgers called: “a sense of enormous release from the tightly bounded intellectual worlds of their youth … new political ambitions and models of authority … an acute sense of a missing social strand in

American politics and a new sense … of the social possibilities of the state.”42 Their exposure to the German academic system was freeing. They realized that new methods might be employed to solve existing problems and they were anxious for that opportunity.

Rauschenbusch’s first pastoral assignment was with a German Baptist congregation in a neighborhood adjacent to New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. Each day, he came face to face with

39 Paul M. Minus, Walter Rauschenbusch, American Reformer (Macmillan, 1988). 40 Ibid. 41 L. E. Loemker, “Personalism as a Philosophy of Religion,” The Personalism Forum, 9:1 (Spring 1993), 20. 42 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 111. 74

24:11 the poverty and deprivation of immigrants and the native-born poor and working class. He blamed the miserable state of their lived existence on the social and economic imbalances between the powerful and the oppressed. He beseeched the people in his pews, and later the middle-class Americans in churches across the nation, to devote time and money to better the lives of those at the lowest rung of the economic ladder. If the churches were content in their apathy toward the poor, he declaimed, “they were complicit in perpetuating an unjust social order”:43

… I saw good men go into disreputable lines of employment and respectable widows consent to live with men who would support them and their children. One could hear the human virtue cracking and crumbling all around. Whenever work is scarce, petty crime is plentiful. But that is only the tangible expression of the decay in the morale of the working people …. The corresponding decay in the morality of the possessing classes at such a time is another story.44

In other words, wherever there is unsatisfied need or want and men, women, and children have no means of achieving resolution of those deficiencies, then despair, immorality, and criminality will fill the void. Through his work, Rauschenbusch advanced the Social Gospel movement along its own evolutionary path pushing for new thinking, new methods, and new commitments to resolving the nation’s social ills.

Given Rauschenbusch’s worldview, the next logical step was to pull such admonitions and moral instructions together in published form. As a young minister, he realized he had “six books in his head – five of them scholarly and one of them dangerous.”45 It took him more than a decade to complete the manuscript for the dangerous book, what became Christianity and the

Social Crisis. American Protestants were persuaded by his narrative that drew connections

43 Ibid. 44 Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century, ed. Paul Raushenbush (Harper Collins, 2007), 196. 45 Gary Dorrien, “Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis,” The Christian Century (Nov. 27, 1997), 29. 75

24:11 between the outcomes of a successful program of social justice and the tenets of the theology of the Social Gospel. Many were motivated to take the important first step from casual agreement with the principles of the movement to commit to formal action and undertook their own efforts to cure social problems in order to foster the Kingdom of God on Earth. The year before his death in 1918, Rauschenbusch published A Theology for the Social Gospel, a slim, 105-page guide to practical methods for weaving the tenets of the Social Gospel into solutions for curing social ills in order to bring about the return of Jesus Christ.

A post-millennialist, Rauschenbusch believed that Christ’s return awaited the success of humanity’s efforts to heal itself from the effects of sin and immorality. His delineation of the theology of the Social Gospel, based on a series of four lectures he had recently given at the Yale

School of Religion, was key to that effort: “We have a social gospel. We need a systematic theology large enough to match it and vital enough to back it.”46 With A Theology for the Social

Gospel, Rauschenbusch sought to chart a path by which mainstream religion returned to the ethical and social teachings of Jesus. This guide was meant as a recipe of sorts for the regeneration of the Christian church as a source for good. He did what he could to bring his vision to reality. Many among his audience were ready to share in that vision.

This affinity between the goals of Progressives and those of Social Gospelers made for a unity of purpose, but it also meant that leaders of the Social Gospel movement held Progressive leaders to account for their achievements. In fact, in his 1910 volume Prayers for God and the

People: Prayers of the Social Awakening, Rauschenbusch guided the faithful in a “Prayer for

Public Officers” that the Progressive movement’s leadership put the common good ahead of personal gain:

46 Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917) (Martino Fine Books, 2010), 4. 76

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O God, thou great governor of all the world, we pray thee for all who hold public office and power, for the life, the welfare, and the virtue of the people are in their hands to make or to mar. We remember with shame that in the past the mighty have preyed on the labors of the poor; that they have laid nations in the dust by their oppression, and have thwarted the love and the prayers of thy servants. We bless thee that the new spirit of democracy has touched even the kings of the earth. We rejoice that by the free institutions of the country the tyrannous instincts of the strong may be curbed and turned to the patient service of the commonwealth.47

In part, the invocation sought divine guidance and in part, it promised oversight and

remonstrations of those who sought the power of leadership:

Strengthen the sense of duty in our political life. Grant that the servants of the state may feel ever more deeply that any diversion of their public powers for private ends is a betrayal of their country. Purge our cities and states and nation of the deep causes of corruption which have so often made sin profitable and uprightness hard. Bring to an end the stale days of party cunning. Breathe a new spirit into all our nation. Lift us from the dust and mire of the past that we may gird ourselves for a new day’s work. Give our leaders a new vision of the possible future of our country and set their hearts on fire with large resolves. Raise up a new generation of public men, who will have the faith and daring of the Kingdom of God in their hearts, and who will enlist for life in a holy warfare for the freedom and rights of the people.48

While the prayer asked for the future moral strength of public leaders, it also contained a

reminder that past transgressions were longer to be tolerated.

American Protestants dominated the Social Gospel movement during the Progressive Era,

but the movement also drew a limited number of Jews and Catholics. Scholars have noted a

concord between the “emphasis placed by numerous American Christians upon the ethical and

moral aspects of theology” and that of American Jews.49 Included among these points of

47 Walter Rauschenbusch, “Prayer for Public Officers,” in Prayers for God and the People: Prayers of the Social Awakening (The Pilgrim Press, 1910), 75-76. 48 Ibid., 76. 49 H. Shelton Smith and others, American Christianity: An Historical Interpretation With Representative Documents (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), II, 259 quoted in Egal Feldman, “The Social Gospel and the Jews,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 56:3 (March 1989), 308, n. 2 and see Feldman’s Dual Destinies: The Jewish Encounter with Protestant America (University of Illinois Press, 1990). 77

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consonance were: (i) a rejection of the immutability of original sin, (ii) a belief that faith is not

enough without the achievement of good works, and (iii) the idea that believers were not in good

standing with God, if they were not in good standing with their fellow man.50 In addition, many

American Protestants participated in an ad fontes movement that reflected a renewed regard for

Judaism as the source of the Christian faith.51 Rauschenbusch, for example, looked to the books

of the prophets from the Hebrew Bible in his search for scriptural validation of the Social

Gospel: “They are an integral part of the thought life of Christianity,” and the philosophy of

personalism that was a major part of Rauschenbusch’s theology for the movement, “Judaism is a

God-centered faith whose chief concern is man.”52 Many American rabbis welcomed this

interest in Judaism from Progressive American Protestants and the Social Gospel movement, and

their interest in the movement’s reform goals was genuine.

Rabbinic support for the Social Gospel’s goals was broad but diverged into two factions.

The first was that of Conservative rabbis, such as Solomon Schechter, president of the Jewish

Theological Seminary of America. The second was that of more liberal American Reform rabbis

whose spokesman was Kaufmann Kohler. Schechter was apprehensive of Rauschenbusch’s

efforts to find solutions for modern social problems in the words of Hebrew prophets. Kohler

argued, on the other hand, that “the task is to rescue from the morass of Rabbinism the prophetic

50 John H. Holmes, The Revolutionary Function of the Modern Church (New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 58-59, 66, 71-72, 74-75 in Feldman, “The Social Gospel and the Jews,” 308, n. 3.; Washington Gladden, Social Salvation (Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1902), 12; Scott Nearing, Social Religion: An Interpretation of Christianity in Terms of Modern Life (The Macmillan Company, 1913), 195; and Josiah Strong, The Next Great Awakening (The Baker & Taylor Company, 1902), 102 quoted in Feldman, “The Social Gospel and the Jews,” 308, n. 4. 51 Feldman, “The Social Gospel and the Jews,” 309. 52 Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (The Macmillan Company, 1907), 1-3, 7-9, 11-13, 21-22, 26-27 quoted in Feldman, “The Social Gospel and the Jews,” 310, n. 9 and Morris Adler, “Torah and Society,” in ed. Abraham Ezra Milgram, Great Jewish Ideas (B’nai B’rith Department of Adult Jewish Education, 1964), 98 quoted in Feldman, 310, n. 13. 78

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ethical spirit underlying its minute regulations.”53 This was not a schism that was easily resolved,

especially in light of the intrusive scrutiny of Christian clerics.54 A towering figure among

American clerics of the Social Gospel movement was Reform rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a vocal

foe, along with Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes, of Tammany Hall politics. Wise spoke,

among other issues, for the large-scale change that was necessary in order to dismantle the

machine politics of New York City that squandered taxpayer funds and the opportunities for

social justice.55 Wise also … “garnered a reputation as a vociferous opponent of prostitution and

white slavery, a champion of woman’s suffrage, an advocate of child labor protections, and

reforming the … juvenile punishment system …”56 He placed himself at the epicenter of the

Social Gospel movement, straddling the schism between the positions of Schechter and Kohler.

A pretense of a developing harmony between Judaism and Protestantism surfaced,

dovetailing with the growing influence of the Social Gospel movement. An 1891 survey of

Protestant ministers by editors of the American Hebrew, however, found that while many of

these ministers paid respect to Judaism, they remained steeped in the semantics of anti-Semitic

53 Solomon Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (Schocken Books, 1961), p13-19, 76, quoted in Feldman, “The Social Gospel and the Jews,” 311, n. 19 and Kaufmann Kohler, Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered (The Riverdale Press, 1943), 17, 311-14, 318-19, 477-78, 481-82 quoted in Feldman, “The Social Gospel and the Jews,” 312, n. 25. 54Recent scholarship of the linkage between Catholic Social Teaching and the Social Gospel has introduced the idea of a connection to the ancient principal of Tikkun Olam (“repair of the world”). Although Tikkun Olam dates to the third century Mishnah, it was an important principle of Reform Judaism that shared an ethical kinship with the Social Gospel. A characterization of Tikkun Olam is that humanity is accountable for “returning the earth to a state of holiness.” Catherine A. Paul and Alice W. Campbell, “Theological Foundations of Charity: Catholic Social Teaching, the Social Gospel and Tikkun Olam,” Social Welfare History Project, n.d., https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/settlement- houses/theological-foundations-charity-catholic-social-teaching-social-gospel-tikkun-olam/. I argue that this links directly to the Social Gospelers’ ideas about bringing the Kingdom of God into existence in this world and not just in the next, not a point argued in Paul and Campbell. 55 Mark A. Raider, “The Rise of Stephen S. Wise as a Jewish Leader,” in The Individual in History: Essays in Honor of Jehuda Reinharz, eds. ChaeRan Freeze, Eugene Sheppard, and Sylvia Fuks Fried (Brandeis University Press, 2015), 144. 56 Ibid. 79

24:11 invective and a belief that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.57 “All admitted the importance of the Crucifixion story in their religious teaching ‘the judicial murder of Jesus Christ is rightly held up … as the great crime of mankind,’ declared Reverend Morgan

Dix …”58 Feldman argues, in effect, that Protestants seemed to want a Judaism without the Jews and “anti-Jewish feeling continued to be supported on a theological base.”59 This echoes the prevailing Progressive mindset that certain individuals were better equipped than others to be in charge of the system, as if, in this case, that Protestants understood Judaism more perfectly than did Jews. Historian Egal Feldman contends, “… from the standpoint of theology, the social gospeler’s interest in the Jew … was ‘not due to any inherent concern for the Jewish people or its history and religion, but only to its significance for the history of Christianity and its dogma.’”60

To the Social Gospelers, Judaism was merely a tool for Christian use in understanding a more perfect Christianity, it retained little value outside of its relationship to Christ.

There was a guarded response among American Roman Catholics to the Social Gospel movement. Catholics of the late nineteenth century had been exhorted by the Holy See to answer the call to aid those less fortunate, especially workers abused by industrialization. Pope Leo

XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”) (1891) proclaimed that the church was charged with leading her people to seek solutions to the social crises of the day. In comparison with proponents of the Social Gospel who thought that scientific beliefs replaced mystical ones, however, Catholics held fast to the ideas of charity as metaphysical.61 These solutions were to be found in scripture: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is

57 Feldman, “The Social Gospel and the Jews,” 316. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid, 317. 60 Julian Morgenstern, As a Mighty Stream: The Progress of Judaism Through History (The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1949), 90 quoted in Feldman, 318-19. 61 Ibid., 99. 80

24:11 charity,” and in a newly envisioned program of outreach incorporating scripture into improved methods to teach Catholic-centered solutions to those crises (1 Cor. 13:13).62

Scholar Brandon Harnish argues that the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a time of “philosophical dislocation.”63 Nowhere was this disconnection more apparent than in the battle between the major Christian denominations of Protestantism and Catholicism.

Catholic men and women religious did not warmly embrace the goal of Social Gospelers to

“marry Christianity and modernity” and “the Catholic Church was not acquiescent to modernity as [were] American Protestants.”64 Jane Addams, Hull-House Settlement founder wrote that,

“Christianity has to be revealed and embodied in the line of social progress as a corollary to the simple proposition, that man’s action is found in his social relationships in the way in which he connects with his fellows; that his motives for action are the zeal and affection with which he regards his fellows.”65 Thus, Social Gospelers believed that Christianity was a means to an end, a tool to be used to advance the social agenda.66 The Catholic view, by comparison, was that “…

Christianity is like stone; it is used for foundation and construction alike, and it cannot be displaced without wrecking all of those things founded on and made of it.”67

One offshoot of Rerum Novarum was development of the program of Catholic Social

Teachings that exemplified the church’s larger mission. It laid the groundwork for cooperation between the church’s social justice teaching and missionary work, social scientists, and public

62 “Charity is repeatedly translated as “love,” and is the virtue by which Christians demonstrate their love of God above all things.” Brian Davies, “Catholic Social Teaching: Faith in a Better World,” Catholic Social Teaching, http://www.catholicsocialteaching.org.uk/principles/info/. 63 Brandon Harnish, “Jane Addams’ Social Gospel Synthesis and the Catholic Response: Competing Views of Charity and Their Implications,” The Independent Review, 16:11 (Summer 2011), 93. 64 Ibid., 94. 65 Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) (Penguin Books, 1998), 85, quoted in Harnish, 95. 66 Harnish, 96. 67 Ibid. 81

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officials.68 The pope also urged Catholics to recognize that personal moral failing was not a

contributing factor to the plight of the poor and downtrodden, rather, industrial “capitalism and

social dislocation” were to blame.69 This was in direct opposition to a principal premise of

Progressive reform that the poor occupied their present station precisely because of their own

moral failings. In addition, Catholic lay women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries walked the crest of the ridge between the two competing gulfs: one, their

maternal/domestic roles and the other, of materialistic values embraced by the dominant

Protestant culture. For recently immigrated Catholic women, participation in social reform

groups meant being caught between European Catholic tradition and American values.70

Complicating the papal vision, therefore, was an American reality – a deeply ingrained

reliance on the Establishment Clause of the Constitution of the United States and the principle of

the separation between church and state. What may have seemed second nature to European

Catholics whose nations had historical connections of one kind or another to the Roman Church,

struck American Catholics as papal overreach. As one scholar observes, “… the American

(Catholic) hierarchy,” while “little inclined to lecture the government or teach the general

public,” remained centrally concerned with “teach[ing] and guid[ing] its own members.”71 There

was minimal official cooperation in the United States between public service Progressive

reformers and the official Catholic Church, with the church preferring instead to limit their

68 Andrew M. Yuengert, “Economics and Interdisciplinary Exchange in Catholic Social Teaching and “Caritas in Veritate,” Journal of Business Ethics, 100:1 (2012), 41-54 quoted in Paul and Campbell, “Theological Foundations of Charity,” n.p. 69 C. S. Fitzgerald, “Looking Back to Move Forward: Christian Social Thought, Religious Traditionalism, and Welfare Theory, Social Work & Christianity, 38:3, 2011, 267-92 quoted in Paul and Campbell, “Theological Foundations of Charity,” n.p. 70 Dierdre M. Moloney, American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 204-05. 71 David J. O’Brien, “Social Teaching, Social Action, Social Gospel,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5:2, American Catholic Social Thought (1986), 198. 82

24:11 instruction to creating Catholic programs for Catholics. For the church, the principal objection to the pragmatic approach of Progressivism was that it elevated empirical truth experienced by man, over the absolute truth of God.72 This concerned those Progressives who ranked the allegorical power of scripture above its literal truth, thus exposing their belief in the lack of intellectual depth of Roman Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants who they believed interpreted the Bible to be the living word of God. Walter Rauschenbusch was among those who believed that Catholics presented an obstacle to achieving the goals of creating God’s Kingdom on Earth when he warned in 1912:

If in the next thirty years the Catholic population outnumbers the Protestant and if the Church then applies Roman theories about Church and State to American life and politics we shall owe that serious situation in part to the capitalistic interests that overcame the poverty and conservativism of the European peasantry and set this mass immigration moving.73

Apparently, not everyone was welcome in the kingdom envisioned by the Social Gospel’s theologian. It took a free-spirited convert to Catholicism, Dorothy Day, to effectively espouse the ideas of modern American Catholic charitable efforts for the poor. The turn to collective responsibility for misery led to collective responsibility to find solutions.

Social Gospelers were not able to connect effectively with the majority of American Catholics and it does not appear that American Catholics were generally any more interested in negotiating the divide.

Nevertheless, there was a slender thread of American Catholicism operating outside the official auspices of the church that was directly involved in activism of the laity and that connected itself to the larger Progressive reform movement. These non-traditional Catholics

72 Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals & the Progressive Era (Columbia University Press, 2004), 37. 73 Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, 278. 83

24:11 wanted to shift the focus away from America’s negative beliefs about Roman Catholics “to demonstrate to fellow Americans the basic compatibility of their religion with American life and institutions, and to illustrate the fact that the church had a significant core of its members engaged in social and intellectual efforts.”74 These lay Catholic reformers navigated a complicated path between fidelity to their faith and loyalty to their country, hoping to forestall a feared backlash against calls of Roman Catholic proselytizing. While they may not have participated in a public capacity in the Social Gospel movement, Catholic women religious, especially those in sanctioned religious orders, had the unusual latitude of the time to operate outside the direct oversight of a male hierarchy.75 They were the “silent social gospelers” whose efforts to minister to the poor and immigrants routinely included missions to educate children and to care for those who had been orphaned or abandoned.76 They were the nuns of the orders whose mission was charity related to children, providing shelter and education, especially the

Ursulines, Sisters of Mercy, and Sisters of Notre Dame.

It is an ironic twist of historical fate that the Protestant sensibility that animated the

Social Gospel movement also found creative expression in the phenomenon of Social

Darwinism. Indeed, the Social Gospel movement and Social Darwinism shared many common assumptions about morality, race, socio-economic status, and intelligence, and the interrelationship of the two helps to illustrate the complexity of their influence. This linkage is important because Social Darwinism reflected the sense of superiority, moral and otherwise, embedded in the founding gospeler’s Protestant beliefs and majority Anglo-Saxon ethnic

74 Deirdre M. Moloney, American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era (The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 40. 75 Illia Delio, “The First Catholic Social Gospelers: Women Religious in the Nineteenth Century,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 13:3, Social Activism (Summer 1995), 6. 76 I intend this term to reflect the passive aggressive posture the women religious would have followed, when necessary, in achieving their mission. 84

24:11 heritage. Moreover, the relationship ran much deeper than mere infatuation, it was a deep abiding affection. Many prominent members of the Social Gospel movement saw in the scientific origins of Social Darwinism, a validation of their patronizing and paternalistic attitudes toward immigrants, the poor, and the working class. Those attitudes flowed downhill from the movement’s leadership to those who carried out the work, including the recently-trained professional social workers who were the gatekeepers of services to the poor and working class in the decades to come.

Charles Darwin claimed no role in the parentage of Social Darwinism – yet others effortlessly made a connection. The reception of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of

Natural Selection (1859) divided society along lines that confirmed most Catholics’ idea about why Progressivism was troubling to them: it valued man’s experiential truth over God’s absolute truth. Those who held firmly to the righteousness of God the Creator, rejected the very notion of evolution. In comparison, those who prided themselves on the supremacy of their rational, scientific thought, found a Holy Grail of their own to which they committed their faith and energy: that man and all of nature had achieved modern form over millennia of transformational adaptations where the most likely to survive were those who thrived under changing circumstances.

In the nineteenth century, Darwin’s ideas about natural selection were appropriated as validation by those with long-held beliefs about the superiority of one race or ethnic group above others. English sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer is often credited with conceiving

Social Darwinism because of his observation that nature is replete with examples of the survival of the fittest. Recent scholarship has pointed the finger of blame elsewhere, principally at social scientists such as Francis Galton, Darwin’s half-cousin and the founder of eugenics, and others

24:11 like Thomas Malthus whose work had previously provided fodder for ideas popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that helped justify the creation of racial hierarchies.77 These theories were still within the mainstream of intellectual and political thought when Progressive

Era reformers, including Social Gospelers, were deciding on their new methodology for helping the less fortunate. They had a significant, if unspoken, impact on those who sought to cure society’s ills by civilizing those who came from immigrant classes and so-called backward religions.

In his popular 1912 publication, Christianizing the Social Order, Rauschenbusch espoused overt entreaties to fellow Christians to “end the economic competition … that when unrestrained by government interference … ‘dechristianizes the social order.’”78 This was clearly a call to remake not only the American economic system, but the American polity itself. His appeals were undergirded by a claim that Christian virtue was concomitant with the “fraternal democracy” that “had evolutionary roots dating to the ‘early history of our Aryan race’” and that

‘immigrants from the south and east of Europe’… ‘have lowered the standard of living for millions of native Americans’ and, worse, have ‘checked the propagation of the Teutonic stock,’ thereby altering ‘the racial future of our nation.’”79 This jeremiad reveals the evolution of

Rauschenbusch’s thought process that first appeared in 1908’s Christianity and the Social Crisis where combining the American economic system with an alleged innate inferiority of non-native born Americans produced “‘an unnatural selection of the weak for breeding and the result is the

77 Leonard, “Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism: The Ambiguous Legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 71 (2009), 37; Weinstein, David, "Herbert Spencer," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/spencer/. 78 Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (1912), 179 quoted in Leonard, “Religion and Evolution in Progressive Era Political Economy,” 456. 79 Rauschenbusch, quoted in Leonard, “Religion and Evolution in Progressive Era Political Economy, 456. 86

24:11 survival of the unfittest.’”80 He fully accepted the premise that social science provided an alternative to waiting for the results of protracted evolution when he openly advocated for the ideas ingrained in Social Darwinism: “We now have such scientific knowledge of social laws and forces of economics of history that we can intelligently mold and guide the evolution in which we take part … we can make history make us.”81 These were potentially ominous words when considered in concert with the piety of American eugenicists echoed in other parts of the world. It would also find an affinity of purpose with those who warned of race suicide as a threat to the nation.

Rauschenbusch was not alone in his appreciation for the power of science and economic rules to “guide the evolutionary process.”82 There was also a linkage between liberal

Protestantism, social sciences, and Progressive professionalism that colored the worldview of many Social Gospelers. For example, the Social Gospeler Rev. Josiah Strong became influential through his book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885) which sold more than 200,000 copies. Strong was born in 1847 in Illinois and educated in Ohio, at Western

Reserve College in Cleveland (now Case Western Reserve University) and at Cincinnati’s Lane

Theological Seminary. His work’s underlying thesis was that the Anglo-Saxon race’s calling was to dominate not only the west of the North American continent but globally, and, if faced with native defiance, to eradicate the world’s barbarian races:

It seems to me that God … is training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world’s future. Heretofore there has always been … a comparatively unoccupied land westward, into which the crowded countries of the East have poured their surplus populations. But the widening waves of migration, which millenniums ago rolled east and west from the valley of the Euphrates, meet to-

80 Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, 275. 81 Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order, 40-41 quoted in Thomas C. Leonard, “Religion and Evolution in Progressive Era Political Economy: Adversaries or Allies?” History of Political Economy 43:3 (2011), 456. 82 Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Order, 275. 87

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day on our Pacific coast. There are no more new worlds. … The time is coming when … the world … [will] enter upon a new stage of its history-the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled. Long before the thousand millions are here … (then) this race of unequaled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it-the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization-having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. … And can any one (sic) doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the ‘survival of the fittest?’83

Like Rauschenbusch, Strong was fascinated with the power sheathed in the tools of scientific knowledge and inquiry to keep America “on its millennial course.”84 He assigned a

“metaphysical importance” to the job of documenting social data precisely, calling such data

“God’s alphabet.” 85 This data, he theorized, would allow men to prophesize about the future by reading the predispositions of those in similar demographic groups.86 In essence, Strong was advocating for the use of social data to predict future behavior based on race and ethnicity.

Sociologist Steven Stritt has argued that in Strong’s “peculiarly reverent attitude for statistics, it is possible to augur the origins of the belief in the transformative potential of social research that would animate the efforts of more secularly-oriented social progressives throughout most of the

20th century.”87 In other words, Strong justified the use of social data to predict who would or would not be benefitted by social intervention as a sign from God pointing the Social Gospelers in the direction of efficacy of effort. A decade later, Strong would again call for the transformation:

83 Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Baker & Taylor Co., 1885), 174-75 quoted in http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~ppennock/doc-JStrong.htm. 84 Steven Stritt, “The First Faith-Based Movement: The Religious Roots of Social Progressivism in America (1880-1912) in Historical Perspective,” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, 41:1 (March 2014), 83. 85 Strong, cited in D. Muller “The Social Philosophy of Josiah Strong: Social Christianity and American Progressivism, Church History, Vol. 28, Issue 2, 1959, 189 quoted in Stritt, “The First Faith-Based Movement,” 83. 86 Ibid. 87 Stritt, “The First Faith-Based Movement,” 83. 88

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of society and that educated, native-born, Protestants should lead the effort: ‘our close relations with the ignorant, the degraded, the vicious, which it is impossible to escape, are forcing us to do them good in self-defence (sic). The very progress of civilization will yet make it impossible for good and respectable men to live in peace and comfort unless other men are good and respectable and comfortable.’88

Each of these ideas percolated in the milieu of Progressive Protestantism that energized much of the Progressive Era’s ideas about social transformation and charitable progress toward socio- economic equality. The efforts of Progressive-era activists to remake American society included reforming government, education, criminal justice, welfare for the downtrodden, and the care of orphaned and abandoned children.

***

When historians and social scientists study the Progressive Era, they assess the unrestricted vision of the Progressives who intended to improve every aspect of society. They also analyze the large subset of Protestant Progressives whose goals were tempered (or intensified, depending on the object of their reform efforts) by the self-assurance of their own moral rectitude. Historian Henry F. May noted that “American Protestant churches were no force for economic reform” well into the late 1870s, choosing instead to “defend the social status quo.”89 Protestant churches were stirred from their self-satisfied slumber, however, by their distaste for the excesses of the Gilded Age that allowed for the ascendance of a few, while significant swaths of the American population struggled within the confines of economic oppression.

Before society could care for its dependent children, however, it needed to realign its priorities at a level far above that placed on the needs of an individual child. First, municipal

88 Strong, The New Era, or, The Coming Kingdom (Baker & Taylor Co., 1893), 345 quoted in Stritt, “The First Faith-Based Movement,” 83-84. 89 Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (Harper Bros., 1949), 91 quoted in Leonard, “Religion and Evolution in Progressive Era Political Economy,” 430. 89

24:11 reforms, including the removal of boss politicians who, although they had made cities work more smoothly, nevertheless lined their pockets with taxpayer money or blatantly sold access to policymakers. In the void created by the loss of middle-class confidence in the American social system, reformers saw a way to remake that system to accomplish progressive changes in society, bringing social justice and order to the chaos. While it offered a positive path for many to follow toward seeking social justice, the Social Gospel movement was not welcoming to most members of minority religions. To become a Social Gospeler meant signing on to a Progressive

American vision of Christianity that borrowed heavily from Judaism, without attribution or affinity, and relegated Roman Catholicism to the debris pile of outmoded, Old World, thought. In its pursuit of its mission, Progressivism reignited many historical biases, especially against immigrants, many of whom during the period were Jews and Catholics. What was beneficial in the Social Gospel movement also proved to be problematic. The creation of a faith-based force to right social wrongs and bring comfort to the needs was matched by the dark side of their divine mission. This manifested itself in a feeling that first, your side was chosen by God as superior because your beliefs were closer to God’s thinking, and that second, your acquired status associated with your race, creed, and socio-economic class, made you superior to others who did not share your status.

The Progressive Era’s child-saving efforts need to be fully examined for their impact, both positive and negative, but child-saving did not begin in the Progressive Era, its roots go much farther back in time. The spiritual naturally influenced the secular when populations faced endemic social ills that placed their vulnerable members in jeopardy. Secular social welfare programs became more humane, and religious social welfare programs became more efficient in their administration. From antiquity to the modern age, the response to the needs of the poor, the

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disabled, widows, and for our purposes, orphans and abandoned children, have come from many

directions: public and private, secular and religious. Individuals would take abandoned and

orphaned children, whether family members or neighbors, into their homes to raise or to shelter,

in an example of the concept of aliena misericordia. Organizations of individuals with or

without official church sanction or public sponsorship brought concerted effort to the problems

of dependent children they saw a need they wanted to fill. That mission was not always inclusive

of every dependent child, often just the ones who fit a desired demographic. The Progressive

political system would impact religious charities through increased organization and

accountability.

From antiquity through the Industrial Revolution, society’s care of dependent children

transformed one that reflected individual initiative with families taking children into their home

to one where civic and religious authorities created institutions that promised continuity of care,

and perhaps, education and vocational training. Although no institution matched the warmth and

affection of a family home, there were many individuals and organizations that did what they

could to provide safe and nurturing shelters to one degree or another. There were commonalities

among privately-run Protestant facilities and sectarian orphanages in the Catholic and Jewish communities and there were differences that flowed from religious tenets. In the following chapters, the narrative and analysis will combine an examination of the institutional records of the child saving facilities in operation in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh with the public record of these asylums and homes as they were covered in the pages of contemporary local newspapers and national magazines..

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Chapter 3 Public Child Welfare and Protestant Charity

THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER A Waif Found

A male infant; about 4 days old, was found at 6:00 a.m. yesterday, on the doorstep of Dr. Al. L. F. Albertson’s residence, No. 508 Wilson Avenue. The waif was handed over to Agent Wightman of the humane society who sent it to the infants’ rest.1

THE PITTSBURGH PRESS Waif Goes to Marshalsea

The two-week-old girl baby that was found in Schenley Park last night will be taken to Marshalsea today by Mrs. C. A. McRoberts, who is the matron at No. 4 police station. Nothing was found on the waif that would lead to the slightest clue for the police to work on.2

THE CINCINNATI DAILY STAR Minor Local Mentions

Late last night a woman was noticed depositing a bundle near the Enterprise Carriage Works, corner of Sycamore street and the Canal. After doing so she ran away. The bundle was found to contain a boy baby, apparently but a few days’ old. The waif was taken to the Hammond-street-Station-house.3

Three newborns in three cities—whether left on a street corner, the bandstand of a local park, or the doorstep of a physician—essentially entrusted to the humanity of a random passerby. Middle-

1 “A Waif Found,” The Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) Jun. 18, 1886, 2. Cleveland.com. http://Cleveland.com /plaindealerarchives/06181886/2. 2 “Waif Goes to Marshalsea,” The Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) Jul. 20, 1899, 11. Newspapers.com. http://www.newspapers.com/pittsburghpress/20Jul1899/11. 3 “Minor Local Mentions,” The Cincinnati Daily Star (Cincinnati, Ohio) Feb. 28, 1880, 8. Newspapers.com. http://www.newspapers.com/cincinnatidailystair/28Feb1880/8. 92

24:11 class Midwesterners were as disturbed as other Americans to read about cases of child abandonment like these in their daily newspapers. Infants and very young children were usually taken to the local foundling home, or, as in the case of the early days of Pittsburgh, the workhouse. Foundling homes, or “infants’ rest” as they were euphemistically known, were palliative care settings from which some infants found permanent homes, but others did not survive the ordeal. These episodes struck a blow to the heart of late-nineteenth century American ideals about the innocence of childhood.

As discussed previously, the dominant religion of the case study cities was Protestantism for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It traveled to the Midwest with the New

Englanders who pushed into the Northwest Territory after the Revolutionary War and with the

European Protestants who followed them. It was the predominant faith of the farmers, craftsman, and artisans who had either left behind established lives along the East coast or completely bypassed the crowded cities of the Atlantic seaboard and immigrated to the region directly from

Europe. These Protestants were prominent members of early municipal efforts and their successors often held the reins of power into the twentieth century. As the principal faith of the settlement and early urbanization period of Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, a faith with origins in its historic disdain for both Catholicism and Judaism, it is small wonder that

Protestants sought to shelter orphaned co-religionists within the arms of their own faith. Without information to indicate the religion of a foundling’s parent, these babies were automatically baptized into one of three denominations of Protestantism: Presbyterian, Methodist, or Baptist.

Each of the cities that are the focus of this study had at least one institution for orphaned children by the 1830s, although over time, a single institution proved insufficient to meet the growing need. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, no fewer than nine

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orphan asylums and children’s homes were in operation in Cincinnati, Cleveland had nearly a

dozen, and Pittsburgh, more than seventy. Their very existence is testament to the ardent public

concern along the political and religious spectra regardless of whether they were operated by

reformers or protectors of traditional practices. In the wider American experience of the

nineteenth century, voluntary associations of those in the middle class were conducive to building a sense of community and a bridge between public and private spheres. They also became launch pads for reforms including what later became the child-saving movement of the

Progressive Era. Certain of these associations were established out of public concern for the culture in which these dependent children grew up.

Childhood is life’s Springtime. Then is sown seed good and bad To grow according to its culture.4

A simple dedication, just three lines of prose, printed in a program marking the centennial

celebration of the founding of the Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum. Yet these seventeen

words distill the very essence of the Progressive Era’s view of the immutability of the impact of

the environment on youth: a child’s future is determined by the environment in which it is raised.

Cleveland

Among the most visible manifestations of community concern for vulnerable Protestant

children of Cleveland were the orphanages founded by a number of religious and secular

organizations “whose underlying rationale,” as historian Michael J. McTighe argued, “was the

impulse to help one’s own.”5 Cleveland’s religiously-affiliated orphanages were established in

4 Beech Brook: A Home for Children: 1852-1952, Dedication page, Mss 4544, Beech Brook, Inc. Records, Container 1, Folder 1, WRHS. 5 McTighe, “Leading Men, True Women, Protestant Churches and the Shape of Ante-Bellum Benevolence” in Cleveland, A Tradition of Reform, eds. David D. Van Tassel and John Grabowski (Kent State University Press, 1986), 18. 94

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part as a response to mid-nineteenth century outbreaks of tuberculosis, yellow fever, and cholera,

and were connected by bonds of ethnic and religious identities to the communities that supported

them. These institutions also continued to house orphans and abandoned children when poverty

and social displacement left the children with little choice between living in an institution or life

on the streets. According to historian Marian J. Morton, during the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, nearly a dozen facilities in Cleveland were established for the benefit of impoverished

children.6 There were public and private orphan asylums, some with a specific religious

affiliation, some which took care of both boys and girls under the same roof, and others that

segregated children by gender and race.

Fig. 8 – “City Workhouse/City Infirmary at Cooley Farms 1871-1912 - ca. 1880s.”7

In the style of many public institutions of the day, the Cleveland City Infirmary was an imposing multiple-story Romanesque Revival building situated amidst green space that kept it physically distinct from, but visually connected to, the neighborhood in which it resided. As a

6 Marian J. Morton, “Homes for Poverty’s Children: Cleveland’s Orphanages, 1851-1933,” Ohio History, Spring 1989, 5. 7 “City Workhouse/City Infirmary at Cooley Farms” 1871-1912. Photo ca. 1880s. Courtesy of WRHS. 95

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matter of necessity, and like other municipalities, Cleveland taxpayers provided minimal public

assistance to the destitute among its residents. This was a time before mothers’ pensions and

unemployment insurance in case of job loss. The poor and homeless were, in many ways, the

invisible people of the nineteenth century, and they had to be housed somewhere in order to keep them from impeding the city’s growth and interfering with an image that city leaders wanted to create to highlight the vitality of a city on the move. Cleveland was certainly not alone in this kind of approach to dealing with pauperism and vagrancy. In 1837, Cleveland built the infirmary on the existing organizational and physical foundations of the Cleveland Township poorhouse.

According to author Mark Gottlieb, its location adjacent to the Erie Street cemetery was deliberate and proved to be a matter of expediency.8 Of course, municipalities were not alone in

strategically placing hospitals close to morgues or cemeteries. Several large manufacturing

concerns, including Carnegie Steel, either paid for wards in major city hospitals dedicated to the

care and treatment of their employees, or built thirty- to fifty-bed hospitals in small towns where

they were the dominant employer.9 Employees usually paid nothing for treatment at such

facilities. Smaller steel mills and steel rolling facilities did cover the cost of treatment for

employees injured on the job but did not have designated wards for their employees.10 In

addition, the Carnegie Steel Homewood plant also housed a morgue and a chapel.11 Such health

care and end-of-life facilities were beyond the reach, or even interest, of most manufacturers.

8 Mark Gottlieb, The Lives of University Hospital of Cleveland: The 125-Year Evolution of an Academic Medical Center (Octavia Press, 1991). 9 “Monthly Bulletin of American Iron and Steel Institute,” 3, 1915 (American Iron and Steel Institute, 1915). 10 Ibid. 11 George Thornton Fleming, History of Pittsburgh and Environs, 3 (The American Historical Society, 1922), 202. 96

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Morton asserts that for the first fifty years of its operation, the city infirmary cared for the

“ill, crippled, insane, feeble-minded, and dependent of all ages,” including orphaned children

who were housed alongside the “insane and the syphilitic.”12 Moreover, Cleveland publicly funded a House of Correction for juvenile delinquents, the City Industrial School, founded by the

Cleveland chapter of the Children’s Aid Society, as well as the Cleveland Industrial School (the successor to the Ragged School, originally established by the local Methodist community).13

While the children housed at the infirmary were intermingled with the general population of

adults in residence, the House of Correction and the two industrial schools were non-residential

facilities.14 These complex, and inadequately supervised, settings highlighted the need for

children-only residential institutions in the city. They pointed to the fact that innocent children

were being housed alongside those with chronic, contagious illnesses, mental health disorders,

and those who had committed criminal acts. The public response to this unacceptable situation is

best gauged by the efforts of those who volunteered to organize efforts to establish alternate

settings for the care of dependent children.

The Cleveland Orphan Asylum was an alternative to placing dependent children in the

infirmary. In 1843, Rebecca Rouse and other members of Cleveland’s Martha Washington and

Dorcas Society (MWDS) founded the Cleveland Orphan Society to find ways to provide care for

children orphaned as a result of the 1848 cholera epidemic. The MWDS operated between 1843

and 1849. It was Cleveland’s first organization to provide poor relief across the city and the

name of the society was an homage to the nation’s first, First Lady, Martha Washington, and the

12 Morton, 3. 13 Ragged Schools were charitable schools founded for children in impoverished neighborhoods. The first Ragged Schools were established in England and Scotland in the early nineteenth century. James Harrison Kennedy, A History of the City of Cleveland: Its Settlement, Rise, and Progress, 1796-1896 (The Imperial Press, 1896), 341-45. http://www.clevelandmemory.org/ebooks/kennedy/c14.html. 14 Morton, 3. 97

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temperance movement of the United States and Dorcas, whose story of good works and charity is

recounted in the Bible’s Book of Acts. In addition, “Only women were society officers and full

members; men joined as honorary members … It provided food, clothing, wood, and sometimes

a job or a place with a concerned family, filling a need for temporary at-home relief.”15 They

planned to care for children orphaned by cholera and as a result of parental intemperance, the

MWDS’s secondary mission: “We need in our city a House of Refuge, an Orphan Asylum,

where the children of drunken or destitute parents, [and] the orphans who have been left

houseless and homeless by the desolating scourge that has visited our shores during the past

summer may find a home.”16 The 1849-1850 cholera epidemic orphaned hundreds of children in

Cleveland. Other children had been abandoned by parents who had lost jobs in the economic

panics of the 1840s and 1850s.17

The initial meeting of the Cleveland Orphan Society, the organization that oversaw the

Cleveland (Protestant) Orphan Asylum (CPOA), was held in the Old Stone Church, home of the

First Presbyterian Society, in 1852. In its early days, as many as a dozen orphans were placed in

a private home operated by Sophia L. Hewitt who was paid by the society to care for the

children. Her brother, Isaac L. Hewitt, paid her living expenses, saving the CPOA additional

funds.18 This was merely a stopgap measure until a permanent facility was built, however, and

fundraising efforts toward that goal occupied much of the next four years. There were dinners,

concerts, and door-to-door solicitations by members of the MWDS to collect funds to erect a

15 Morton, 4-5. 16 J. H. Wade, The Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum: An Outline History: 1849-1903, Mss 4544, Beech Brook, Inc. Records, Container 1, Folder 1, WRHS. 17 Carol Poh Miller and Robert Anthony Wheeler, Cleveland: A Concise History, 1796-1996, 2nd ed. (Indiana University Press, 1997), 57. 18 The Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum: An Outline History, 1849-1903, n.p., Mss 4544, Beech Brook, Inc., Records 1852-1966, Container 1, Folder 1, WRHS. 98

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home for the asylum and then to fund an endowment to cover its ongoing operating costs.19 In

1857, an anonymous friend of the CPOA wrote a letter to the editor of the Cleveland Herald calling on the citizens of Cleveland to come together to support the asylum in a meaningful way:

Are there not two hundred men and women in this city who will give Five Dollars each to relieve our Protestant Orphan Asylum from its present embarrassment? There is not enough money in its treasury to carry it another month … as an honest Protestant, I am heartily ashamed of so many side-ways and by-ways in order to raise a little money for our Protestant institution of charity …”20

This editorial effort at shaming the giving public raised $1,500 within a month. In addition, the

Cleveland Common Council (city council) voted a stipend of $150 to allow the hiring of a teacher: “This enabled the Asylum to admit from time to time children from the City Infirmary and was the beginning of the separation of children and adults in the infirmaries and the consequent bettering of their environment.”21 An opportunity to rescue children from the city’s

infirmary was a long-term goal of the private institutions, regardless of religious affiliation.

Before the CPOA admitted the first child, the size of its mission doubled with annexation by Cleveland of neighboring Ohio City, creating a large municipality of distinct east and west sides. Cleveland aggressively annexed surrounding cities and villages throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries eventually occupying nearly eighty square miles.22 From the COA

minute book, an undated newspaper clipping states:

THE ORPHAN ASYLUM.—As the period has arrived for the annual call upon our citizens for the support of the Orphan Asylum, it may not be out of place to awaken attention to the fact, that within the past year, Cleveland has enlarged her borders by her union with Ohio City, thus bringing the destitute children on the West Side into full fellowship and privilege with those on the East. In view of this

19 “Monthly Reports,” Apr. 9, 1985, May 7, 1855, and Mar. 9, 1959, Mss 4544, Beech Brook, Inc., Records 1852-1966, Container 1, Folder 3, WRHS. Also see Michael McTighe, “‘True Philanthropy’ and the Limits of the Female Sphere: Poor Relief and Labor Organizations in Ante-Bellum Cleveland,” Labor History, 27:2, (1986), 227-56. 20 An Outline History, n.p. 21 Ibid. 22 Miller and Wheeler, 63. 99

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fact, it will be necessary to wait upon the ‘West-siders’ for their part of the annual subscription heretofore so cheerfully accorded by our citizens for the current expenses of this noble Institution. We are confident our friends on that side will heartily respond to this call which will be made as early as possily (sic) in the month of June.23

The administrators of the CPOA called for those in Ohio City with sufficient assets to support

the CPOA with donations. Ohio City had only about one-third of the population of the city of

Cleveland at the time of the annexation, but it had been an equal competitor in the commercial and economic arenas.24 The competition actually resulted in violent conflict in 1837 when a new

bridge at Columbus Street over the Cuyahoga River, diverted traffic away from the Ohio City

business district.25

Sixteen children, five of whom were adopted out to local families, were admitted to the

CPOA in 1855, in its next temporary facility, a home rented by Eliza Witt, one of the members

of the Board of Managers. Concurrently, the challenges of caring for children in loco parentis

became more complex. Children taken into the CPOA became the sole responsibility of the

CPOA and birth parents signed a contract whereby they legally relinquished their claim on the child. The CPOA established legal rules for contact between birth parents and their children placed in the CPOA if the children were subsequently outplaced or indentured to a third party. It also included in its by-laws the legal terms by which parents had to abide:

23 Likely, the clipping is from 1854, the year that Ohio City was annexed by the City of Cleveland, becoming city wards 8, 9, 10, and 11. Mss 4544, Beech Brook, Inc. Records, Container 1, Folder 2, WRHS. 24 Michael J McTighe, A Measure of Success: Protestants and Public Culture in Antebellum Cleveland (State University of New York, 1994), 3. 25 The permanent Columbus Street bridge structure replaced the existing floating bridge over the river shared by the two cities. When Ohio City residents began boycotting the new Columbus Street bridge, Cleveland removed its half of the floating bridge, stranding Ohio City residents. A thousand of them, led by Ohio City’s First Presbyterian Church minister James Pickands, marched to the halfway point on the bridge where they were met by an equally large force from Cleveland. A few people received serious injuries in the fight that followed, but the bridge sustained little damage. Overt tensions eventually cooled, but sentiments remained strained for nearly two decades. Ibid., 3-4. 100

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No child shall be admitted a member of the Institution unless the parents, guardians, or friends who may have the care of it, sign the following agreement:

I, the subscriber, solicitous that my child shall receive the benefits and advantages of the Cleveland asylum for orphaned and destitute children, & the Board of Managers being willing to receive & provide for him (or her) & also to place him (or her) in a virtuous family until he (or she) is of age, agreeably to the rules & regulations of the Society, provided I relinquish my child to them; I do therefore promise not to interfere in the management of him (or her) in any respect whatsoever, to visit him (or her) without their consent, and in consideration of their benevolence in thus receiving & providing for my child, I do relinquish all right & claim to it and its services, until it shall arrive of age, and I do engage that I will not ask nor receive any compensation for the same, nor take my child from, nor induce it to leave the family where it may be placed, by the Board of Managers of the asylum.26

While the language is dense, this type of legal arrangement was typical for institutions of the time. A surviving parent was usually not allowed to visit their child once the child had been placed with another family. They promised not to interfere with how the child was being raised, either in the institution or in a private home. They were not allowed to seek payment in exchange for their child, or their child’s services, and they were not to try to get their child to leave the asylum or the private home setting. This standard legal language was meant to protect both the institutions and the child. Variations of it are found in the governing documents of several of

Cleveland’s child welfare facilities from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The records of the CPOA do not note any instances where a parent or guardian who executed such an agreement ever violated its terms by taking their child from an adoptive home setting.

Nevertheless, several children who were placed out were noted to have run away from the private outplacement settings.27 Although the records of the CPOA do not include a reason why

26 “By-Laws of the Managers,” Orphan Asylum Society, Vol. 1, n.p., Mss 4544, Beech Brook, Inc. Records, Container 1, Folder 2, WRHS. 27 Mss 4544, Beech Brook, Inc. Records, Container 1, Folder 2, WRHS. 101

24:11 a child may have run away from a placement, such motivations likely included the child’s delinquency or abuse by an adoptive parent or custodial guardian.

In the late 1860s, the CPOA faced a situation typical of institutions of the day, it was running short on space and low on operating funds. Mary Mason Fairbanks, wife of the publisher of the Cleveland Herald, trustee of the CPOA, and friend of Mark Twain, enlisted the author and humorist to lecture for the benefit of the CPOA.28 On January 22, 1869, he delivered an encore performance of his “The American Vandal Abroad” lecture, which he had delivered in Cleveland just the year before. At the conclusion of the lecture, he added:

I am well aware of the fact that it would be a most gigantic fraud for you to pay a dollar each to hear my lecture. But you pay your dollar to the orphan asylum, and have the lecture thrown in! So if it is not worth anything it does not cost you anything … there is no expense connected with this lecture. Everything is done gratuitously, and you have the satisfaction of knowing that all you have paid goes for the benefit of the orphans … Don’t be afraid of giving too much to the orphans, for however much you give, you have the easiest end of the bargain … There is a suspicion of impurity and imposition about many ostensibly benevolent enterprises, but there is no taint of reproach upon this for the benefit of these little waifs upon the sea of life, and I hope your benevolence will not stop here.29

The lecture raised more than $500 for the CPOA. In addition, in 1870, Cleveland philanthropist

Leonard Case, Jr. donated the land and businessman Jeptha H. Wade, Sr. donated the funds to construct the CPOA’s next home on St. Clair Street, completed in 1878. Both men were members of the CPOA’s board of trustees, Wade its president for a number of years. Born in upstate New York, he made his fortune in railroads and was also a founding member of Western

Union Telegraph. In 1875, the CPOA, which had been taking children from a number of

28 Mary Mason Fairbanks and Mark Twain were passengers on an 1867 excursion to the Holy Land aboard the Quaker City. Fairbanks reported on the journey to her husband’s newspaper and Twain corresponded on behalf of the Alta-California. They developed a lasting friendship on the journey. Twain referred to Mary in correspondence as “Mother” and she attended his 1870 wedding to Olivia Langdon. Fred W. Lorch, “Notes and Queries: Mark Twain’s Orphanage Lecture,” American Literature, 7:4 (Jan. 1936), 453-55. 29 Ibid., 454-55. 102

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different ethnic and sometimes religious backgrounds, solidified its mission under the banner of

Protestantism and changed its name to the Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, but the records

do not reflect the motivation for the addition of “Protestant” to the name of the CPOA, but to

stand apart after the establishment of the Jewish Orphan Asylum and the numerous Catholic

institutions, was a likely factor. Shortly after this change was made, the board members agreed

that the next logical step was to seek city funding for the newly rebranded asylum:

It will be remembered that in the report of the previous year allusion was made to the fact that the Orphan Asylum is of necessity a great relief to the City Infirmary, and that in urging some compensation for this relief the Board are following a precedent established by similar institutions in other cities. Of such a claim the present mayor spoke favorably in his mayoral address. It would seem therefore but that little effort need be put forth to give to the Asylum an annual income from this source. Such a compact appears but the simple requirement of justice inasmuch as this Institution has given and continues to give a fair equivalent in opening her doors to every destitute child who legitimately belongs to the Infirmary. Still the Board are willing to leave the feasibility of their place, and the means of accomplishing it, to the Trustees of the Asylum who are better skilled in legislation than themselves.30

Other religiously affiliated orphanages were not receiving public funding, likely because those

institutions were not taking children from the rolls of the infirmary.

In 1916, Cleveland businessman and orphanage trustee Jeptha H. Wade, II, the grandson

of Jeptha H. Wade, Sr., made a gift of his 95-acre “Beech Brook” farm in Pepper Pike to the orphanage. It is impossible to determine the value of Wade’s donation in 1916 based on 2020

property tax assessments, and no records exist that indicate the value of the gift at the time it was

given, still, the gesture was significant. Within a decade of the younger Wade’s gift, the children

from the asylum were moved to the Beech Brook Home, named for the Wade’s farm. Beech

Brook became the official name of the CPOA. The children resided in Tudor-style cottages

30 “Report of the Managers,” Orphan Asylum Society, Vol. 2, n.p., Mss 4544, Beech Brook, Inc. Records, Container 1, Folder 3, WRHS. 103

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situated on acres of green space, much more home-like than the imposing brick edifice that had been the orphanage’s large, institutional facility for the prior sixty years. Children at Beech

Brook attended public school in the Orange school district. Matrons tried to make each cottage feel like a home and run like a family with each child having age-appropriate responsibilities to its safe and efficient operation.31 These cottages operated as temporary homes for orphans until

the 1950s when the mission of Beech Brook became one of residential care for troubled

adolescents.

Fig. 9 – “Beech Brook, Pepper Pike – Tudor-Style Cottages, ca. 1950s.”32

Jeptha H. Wade, Sr., Jeptha H. Wade, II, and Leonard Case, Jr. were not the only wealthy

Clevelanders to provide significant funding for a Protestant orphanage. Another useful case

study is that of the Jones School and Home for Friendless Children (Jones Home). Carlos L.

Jones and his second wife, Mary, actually undertook building from the ground up the school and

home that bore their name. By the late 1880s, Cleveland’s Jones, was in his late fifties and

recently retired. His professional life had been rewarding, but his personal life had been marked

31 Mss 4544 Beech Brook, Inc. Records, Container 1, Folder 17, WRHS. 32 “Beech Brook, Pepper Pike – Tudor-Style Cottages, ca. 1950s, BeechBrook.org, 104

24:11 by repeated family tragedy, hardly an unfamiliar experience to many in the nineteenth century. A young child in 1831, Jones moved with his family from New Jersey to Cleveland. As a teenager, he worked as a farm hand in what was once rural Parma, Ohio but when he became a young adult, he traded farming for a more lucrative career selling farm equipment, eventually amassing a sizeable estate.

The Jones Home shows a light on the motivations of local community leaders whose interest in child-saving stemmed from personal tragedy. In contrast to the CPOA, the Jones

Home, like other private orphanages of the day, was taken up as a personal family mission. The children first admitted by the Jones Home were limited to those who were ethnically and religiously comparable to their benefactors—in this case, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. The Jones

Home was chartered in the fall of 1886 and Jones recruited notable Clevelanders, such as former president Rutherford B. Hayes, Cleveland municipal judge James M. Coffinberry, and industrialists Samuel W. Sessions and Isaac Lamson (Sessions’ business partner and brother-in- law) to sit on the Board of Trustees. They attended regular meetings of the board and made regular financial contributions that supported the operation of the home.33

Jones, Sessions, and Lamson were also all members of a Cleveland congregation of the

Disciples of Christ church, a branch of Protestantism that called for a return to first-century

Christianity.34 It was a view Martin Luther embraced four centuries before, from the moment he publicly questioned the Roman Catholic Church. He espoused that in a return to the sources of

Christianity, Christianity renewed itself. This supported the idea that men and women “are all consecrated as priests by baptism” and therefore, did not require the intervention by the clergy in

33 Annual Reports of the Jones Home, Mss 4049, Jones Home, Container 1, Folder 16. 34 “History of the Disciples: Early History,” Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada, Disciples.org, http://disciples.org/our-identity/history-of-the-disciples/. 105

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their relationship with God.35 The Disciples of Christ, a distinctly American Protestant sect, had

grown to nearly one million members nationwide between 1800 and 1900.36 Disciples were

known for the “appeals to reject abstract creeds and formal rituals, by the proclamation of the

spiritual worth and equality of each individual, and by the insistence on local church autonomy

and complete lay leadership.”37 In this way, they tied themselves to the ideas of Luther about the

laity being a priesthood of all believers. They also connected themselves to the Social Gospel’s

ideas about making the Kingdom of God on Earth through their mantra that “… God rewarded

human effort and compensated present difficulty in secular endeavors and more particularly in

sacred endeavors.”38 The Cleveland Disciples of Christ claimed several of the city’s most

prominent residents as members who were in like company with members of the church in other

parts of the country including “doctors, lawyers, judges, educators, and government officials

(including President James A. Garfield).”39 These wealthy and influential members of the

congregation of the Cleveland Disciples of Christ were believers who relied on their own initiative and resources to create positive change.

Much of the charitable efforts of these Clevelanders is noted only in the official documents of the Jones Home. These documents rarely, if ever, deal with motivation beyond the level of general platitudes on the worthiness of the undertaking. While men like Jones and

President Hayes donated their personal papers for posterity, the actions of trustees like Sessions,

Lamson, and others are only discoverable in the official institutional record and by reading

35 Martin Luther, “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” trans. Charles M. Jacobs, rev. James Atkinson, Three Treatises, 2nd ed. (Fortress Press, 1990), 12. 36 Carl Wayne Hensley, “Rhetorical Vision and the Persuasion of a Historical Movement: The Disciples of Christ in Nineteenth Century American Culture,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 61:3 (Oct. 1975), 250. 37 Ibid., 251. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 106

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against the grain of the lines of others’ correspondence. Interestingly, the Social Gospel’s

Washington Gladden wrote a full-length biographical memorial upon the passing of his friend,

President Hayes, printed in the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly in 1895. Hayes

was himself a half-orphan, having lost his father who died two months before Hayes was born.

Gladden extolled Hayes’ “modesty, industry, and patience” throughout his life, no matter his role at the time.40 When it came to the former president’s religious leanings, Gladden distilled the

essence of his experience down to a belief in the equality of the second commandment “Thou

shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” to the first “The shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy

heart.”41 In other words, to follow Christ’s direction to his disciples to: “Love one another; as I

have loved you” (John 15:12). It is little surprise, therefore, that Hayes agreed to join the board

of trustees of the Jones Home.

Although they were involved in establishing the religious and educational practices of the

institution that carried their name, the Joneses did not take responsibility for the day-to-day care of these children but provided initial funding for the home’s construction and operation. The children attended public school from the beginning (although “School” was not removed from the official name of the institution until sometime after 1910), and “prayers in the morning, a blessing at the table before each meal, and a chapter in the Bible at night before retiring, shed a heavenly light through the Home.”42 The superintendent’s report also made note of regular

bathing, “as cleanliness is said to be next to godliness,” and access to “ample grounds [that]

furnish an abundance of fruits and afford superior advantages for games and other exercise in the

40 Washington Gladden, “Rutherford Birchard Hayes,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, IV, 1895, 359. 41 Ibid., 360. 42 “Second Annual Report: The Jones School and Home for Friendless Children: 1889-1890” 10, Mss 4049, Jones Home of Children’s Services Records, Container 1, Folder 16, WRHS. 107

24:11 open air.”43 The Joneses housed the first nine orphans in the original homestead on their property at the intersection of Pearl Road and Library Corner in Cleveland’s Brooklyn neighborhood.

They enlarged it with dormitories to accommodate another fifty children within the first three years.

The Joneses donated the land, and original residence, and cash. Cash contributions were recorded from dozens of other wealthy Clevelanders as well, including the Lamsons, Judge

Coffinberry, and Mr. and Mrs. Sessions:

Fig. 10 – “Life Membership and Cash Subscriptions 1888.”44

In-kind donations of furniture, housewares, dry goods, including bedding, and fuel and provisions to outfit and operate the facility were also acknowledged in the First Annual Report:

43 Ibid. 44 “First Annual Report: The Jones School and Home for Friendless Children: 1888-1889,” 7, Mss 4049, Jones Home of Children’s Services Records, Container 1, Folder 16, WRHS. 108

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Fig. 11 – “In-Kind Donations First Day, 1887.”45

The surviving records reflect that there was far less formality about the records kept for admission of the children than for the minutes of official meetings. Many of the notations with information on the children considered for admission reveal the desperate straits in which parents, and erstwhile guardians alike, found themselves:

July 15 - Mr. John Ryan, child of three years (girl), Mother in Asylum, Father engineer … August 15 - Mrs. Amelia Clay … 4 & 6 yrs. Father gone … August 30 - E. W. Foster … Three children 3-7-9, Mother dead … (n.d.) Miss McBeen, child four years, Father dead, Mother deserted child, cared for by Aunts who work for E. C. Higbee46

The children are rarely named in the Jones Home’s book of applicants from this early period.

Most often, the notations identify only the adults making application for the children’s admission. Over the course of the nine years covered by the surviving book of applicants, more than five hundred families applied to have their children admitted to the care of the Jones Home staff. Early cases were investigated by members of the Visitation Committee of the Board of

Lady Managers who rotated onto and off the committee on a monthly basis. They reported

45 Ibid., 8-9. 46 This is an excerpt of the entries from a single page in the Record of Applicants. It is typical of the entries found throughout the Record. “Record of Applicants: 1895-1903,” Mss 4049, Jones Home of Children’s Services Records, Container 1, Folder 1, WRHS. 109

24:11 regularly to the Board at its monthly meetings as to the outcome of their investigations and recommended whether a child, or multiple children from one family might be admitted. Their recommendations also included information as to whether a parent or guardian was able to provide some portion of the child’s room and board: “After receiving the children into the

Institution, if the parent is able to pay a small sum for their care, he or she will be permitted to do so; but if not, the little ones be provided for without compensation ….”47

The ledger that tracked admissions to the Jones Home from December 1885 to June

1915, contains the names of children, their date of birth, nationality, admission year, dismissal year, and remarks on the outcome of dismissal. This change reflects evolving state requirements for reporting on inmates in orphanages and asylums. Early entries in the ledger, those from between 1885 and 1910, reveal that more than ninety-seven percent of the children admitted to the Jones Home were German, Irish, English or “American” according to notations made in the nationality column next to each child’s name:

Fig. 12 – “Record of Old Admissions: Dec. 1885-Jun. 1915.”48

47 “Second Annual Report: The Jones School and Home for Friendless Children,” 9, Mss 4049, Jones Home of Children’s Services Records, Container 1, Folder 16, WRHS. 48 “Book of Old Admissions: 1885-1915,” 52-53, Mss 4049, Jones Home of Children’s Services Records, Container 1, Folder 1, WRHS. 110

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It is reasonable to assume that the designation “American” referred to native-born children.49 In the final years covered in the volume, 1910 to 1915, German and American children still dominate the rolls, but they are joined by a significant number of Bohemians, Hungarians,

Swedes, and children of Slavic origin; fewer Anglo-Saxons, but still white and overwhelmingly

Protestant.50 English and Irish immigrant children virtually disappear from these later entries.

Either the population of orphans from these particular groups were no longer statistically significant, or more likely, they were subsumed into the category of “American.”

Carlos and Mary Jones, who died in 1897 and 1898, respectively, left the Jones Home well-positioned to survive into the twentieth century, leaving a bequest of real estate to be sold in order to fund an endowment.51 In 1903, the Jones School moved into its final facility with room for seventy-five children, in a newly-constructed three-story brick building on West 25th Street on Cleveland’s West Side built especially for the home.52 Monies were raised to support the new facility with the Jones’ bequest, annual subscriptions, member gifts, and donations from fraternal organizations. There are no extant financial records for these funds but we can assume that they were substantial enough to be able to sustain the Jones Home financially until it became an affiliate of Cleveland’s Community Chest in 1920. Ultimately, it was the vision of one couple, narrow as it may have been, that provided the foundation for an alternate avenue of care for certain Cleveland orphans.

49 Ibid., 19-82. 50 Ibid, 83-111. 51 “Miscellaneous Financial Records,” Mss 4049, Jones Home of Children’s Services Records, Container 1, Folder 17, WRHS. 52 The Jones School and Home for Friendless Children was merged with Children’s Services in the 1960s as the Jones Home for Children’s Services. Today, it is operated by Applewood Centers, Inc., a private, non-profit agency that serves “children, adolescents, and families with behavioral, learning, and emotional problems.” “About Us,” ApplewoodCenters.org., http://www.applewoodcenters.org/. 111

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Both the CPOA and the Jones Home were committed to Protestant inculcation of the children they cared for. Both institutions relied on the efforts of individuals to donate time, money, and materials to ensure that Protestant children had a home, when family tragedy or dysfunction precluded them being raised in the family home. The Jones Home was different from the CPOA in that it did not, and in fact, was unable to, take every child who sought admission:

The fact that only one child in seven seeking admission to the Home was admitted during the year speaks for the opportunity for similar service in the city, and except that the limitations of the Home are well known, it is probable that very many more applications would have been received … necessarily only the most deserving cases could be given attention for the greater proportion of those rejected were worthy of help could help have been given.53

By looking at these institutions within a single city, it is possible to assess how their financial circumstances impacted the size and viability of their missions and how the limitations on what they accomplished affected who they chose to help.

Cincinnati

Cincinnati was home to several residential and non-residential institutions for vulnerable children. These institutions were segregated by ethnicity, religion, race, orphan status (half or full), and whether the child had experienced contact with the justice system. Like other Midwest cities of the day, Cincinnati developed a variety of incarceration programs for juveniles and adolescents who had committed a criminal act, including those who were simply homeless. In

Cincinnati, taxes and public donations funded two institutions for housing children and adolescents marked as delinquent by the local police. The first in Cincinnati was the House of

53 “Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Jones Home for Friendless Children: 1887-1915: Year Ending September 30th, A.D. 1915,” Mss 4049, Jones Home of Children’s Services Records, Container 1, Folder 16, WRHS. 112

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Refuge (later, the House of Reform), which opened in 1850.54 The facility took children as

young as three years of age, who had come in contact with the police, either by virtue of

shoplifting, “incorrigibility” (an amorphous term associated with runaways), “drunkenness” (in

children as young as five), and homelessness:

Our object, in the establishment of this institution, is, to follow after the youth that has broken away from the usual restraints of society and law; and, instead of leaving him to an unrestrained course of crime, and consigning him to the company of those who are degraded beyond hope of reform, to constrain him to forsake his depraved habits, and create that which is useful and good.55

This excerpt from an address commemorating the opening of the House of Refuge was delivered

by 40-year old Cincinnati attorney, Alphonso Taft, who went on to praise the city and its

residents who had been “willing to bear the heavy burdens of taxation” to fund schools for

children who, “should they come, shall be served.”56 The children to be cared for in the House of

Refuge, however, were not among those served by public schools, either as a result of their alleged misbehavior or through the neglect of parents. In the 1870s, boys older than fourteen and girls older than sixteen who continued to have contact with the police were placed in the House of Correction, essentially a juvenile detention annex of the public workhouse built in 1869, one of many the state of Ohio required to be built in cities with populations greater than 100,000 residents. Nevertheless, most orphaned and abandoned children did not fall under the purview of the justice system because they had not committed a crime. They were either placed in publicly funded orphanages or in those affiliated with the child’s particular faith.

54 The surviving records of the House of Refuge are split between collections housed in the University of Cincinnati’s Archive of Rare Books and the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. 55 Alphonso Taft, “Address Delivered on the Occasion of the Opening of the Cincinnati House of Refuge, In the Chapel of the Institution, October 7, 1850,” (Wright, Ferris & Company, 1850), 4-5. Alphonso Taft was the father of William Howard Taft, the 27th President of the United States who served from 1909 to 1913. 56 Ibid., 2-3. 113

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The Cincinnati Orphan Asylum, the first quasi-public orphanage in the city, opened in

1832 as a result of an outbreak of Asiatic cholera. Although the orphanage claimed no particular religious affiliation, taking in children of all Christian denominations, it succumbed to the pressure of ideas of racial stratification within American society and did not admit African

American children.57 To fill that void, the New Orphan Asylum for Colored Children was established a decade later by a group of white and African American men and women. The early abolition effort was led by Lydia Mott, a Quaker widow who relocated to Cincinnati from her home in Skaneateles, New York where she had been headmistress of the Friends Female

Boarding School.58 The Cincinnati Orphan Asylum operated on a combination of public funding and the largesse of wealthy donors including the Emery family, Homer Lunken, and Dr. Otto

Geier.

The Cincinnati chapter of the Children’s Aid Society established an Industrial School in

1859 and began placing children in homes in rural areas immediately surrounding the city. It closed just four years later for a lack of public financial support, but a number of the Quaker women who had participated in the operation of the Industrial School, including Hannah Shipley, opened the Penn Mission Day School in 1864. Later that year, they accepted thirteen children into a residential program. However, the institution ran headlong into a web of bias and mistrust that played out between the Protestant and Catholic communities as the majority of children

57 I have purposely chosen to exclude a review of the records of orphanages that exclusively served African American children inasmuch as the bases of comparison in this study are limited to religion and nationality, as opposed to a comparison based on race. A particularly inspiring work of scholarship with race as the primary variable is Child Care in Black and White: Working Parents and the History of Orphanages (University of Illinois Press, 2012), by historian Jessie B. Ramey. Dr. Ramey examines the differences between segregated orphanages in Pittsburgh founded by the same individual. 58 Jana A. Bouma, “A Powerful Influence in Disseminating Knowledge: Lydia Philadelphia Mott and the Friends Female Boarding-School in Skaneateles, New York,” The Crooked Lake Review, (Fall 2000), http://www.crookedlakereview.com/articles/101135/117fall2000/117bouma.html. 114

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served came from heavily Catholic neighborhoods in the city, even after changing its name to

The Children’s Home. Protestant citizens only resented the efforts to help poor children when a

significant number of the children helped were Catholic. The dispute had simmered for a

generation and began “soon after the founding of St. Peter’s [orphanage]. Protestant clergymen

began to launch malicious attacks on Catholicism and the pope, and the opening of a Catholic

boys’ college in the city in 1831 [Xavier College] only intensified the fear.”59 An uneasy co-

existence was only to be achieved once the number of needy Protestant children receiving

institutional care reached parity with the number of similarly-situated Catholic children.

Progressive Era reforms were necessary to diminish the internecine tensions even further. The

Children’s Home was one of several small institutions that opened when a need arose although, unlike most that closed just as quickly as they opened, it is still in operation today, providing educational and therapeutic treatment for children with behavioral, social, and learning differences.

As discussed in Chapter 1, St. John’s pastor August Kröll was an early promoter of

German language newspapers in the city. Amid the second wave of German immigration and the return of deadly cholera in the late 1840s and 1850s, Kröll also led efforts in the German

Protestant community to establish the German General Protestant Orphan Society (Deutscher

Allgemein Protestantischer Waisen-Verein) that operated an orphanage for German Protestant children.60 Later named the German Protestant Orphan Home (GPOH), the institution took on

the imprimatur of communal crusade when Richard Stumpe and his wife, two of its early

supporters, died in the 1849 cholera outbreak. The Stumpes left behind three sons, two of whom

59 Judith Metz, S.C., “The Sisters of Charity in Cincinnati, 1829-1852,” Vincentian Heritage Journal, 17:3 (1996), 209. 60 Ibid. 115

24:11 were the first orphans admitted to the home.61 The GPOH founders blanketed the German

Protestant community with a fundraising campaign and an initial amount exceeding $4,000 was raised through an “orphan’s feast” that became an annual event and included a parade, pageant, and meal for benefactors. Typically, these events were attended by tens of thousands of

Cincinnatians. 62 The orphanage also encouraged Protestants in the city to leave bequests to the institution in their wills and offered annual membership subscriptions at a cost of two dollars each.

Fig. 13 – “(German) General Protestant Orphan Fig. 14 – Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Home, Mt. Auburn, Cincinnati, ca. 1850.”63 Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio.” 64

An imposing brick edifice and a parklike setting at the corner of Highland Avenue and Shillito

Street in the Mt. Auburn neighborhood in Cincinnati’s hills above downtown housed the GPOH for nearly a century. With these initial funds, the society purchased four acres in the Mt. Auburn neighborhood from Judge Jacob Burnet.65 Construction of the orphanage began in 1850 and was

61 Vol. 56, General Protestant Orphan Home Records, 1849-1970, Mss 1043, Cincinnati Museum Center. 62 “Orphans: Gladdened with a Feast: Which Was Attended by Ten Thousand Persons: A Grand Parade and Pleasing Exercise—Big Sum Realized by the Lady Workers,” Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), May 7, 1894, 8. 63 “(German) General Protestant Orphan Home, Mt. Auburn, Cincinnati,” (ca. 1850), www.CincinnatiMemoryProject.org, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. 64 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio, 1891, 4, 111, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g4084cm.g4084cm_g06645189104. 65 Jacob Burnet was a New Jersey native and lawyer who held many public offices in the Northwest Territory and the State of Ohio in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. He owned significant landholdings 116

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completed the following year. The motto the orphan society adopted reflected a mix of the ideals

of republican motherhood and the Protestant work ethic: "to create worthwhile members of society, good citizens to the City of Cincinnati, and hard workers."66 Historians Linda Kerber

and Gordon Wood have written extensively on the role of mothers during the early days of the

republic to inculcate their children in the tenets of virtuous citizenry in order to insure the

success of the nation.67 “Motherhood,” assured Wood, became as critical to the republic as “the

fourth branch of government.”68 It does not take much parsing of the orphan society’s motto to see that it fancied itself an institutional mother in this regard.

The GPOH admitted full-orphans and accepted half-orphans, but only if the surviving parent had previously been a supporting member of the orphan society. According to the orphanage’s Constitution, only Protestants over the age of 21 were allowed to be members, thus precluding membership by Catholics or Jews.69 There were ten children in residence three

months after the home opened and at the end of the first year, more than five dozen children had

been admitted. By 1870, the number exceeded 100. Most of these children attended public

school during the academic year and received supplemental instruction during the summer. The

girls learned to sew and knit and the boys received lessons in German, mathematics, history,

geography, reading, and writing.70 All the children also received musical instruction and

in the Cincinnati area. “Jacob Burnet,” Ohio History Central, http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Jacob_Burnet. 66 “Zu schaffen, lohnende Mitglieder der Gesellschaft, gute Bürger der Stadt Cincinnati, und harte Arbeiter,” “Scope of Collection Notes,” Mss 1043, General Protestant Orphan Home Records, CHSLA. 67 Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1985) (The University of North Carolina Press, 1997) and Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969) (The University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 68 Wood, vi. 69 “Constitution des Deutschen Allgemein Protestant Waisen-Verein von Cincinnati, O.; Gegründet 1849; Cincinnati, Ohio, 1870.” Mss 1043, Box 1, Folder 1, General Protestant Orphan Home Records, 1849- 1970, Cincinnati Museum Center. 70 “Scope of Collection Notes,” Mss 1043, General Protestant Orphan Home Records, 1849-1970, Cincinnati Museum Center. 117

24:11 participated in Sunday school classes led by students from the Lane Theological Seminary.71 To the Protestant community, Protestant orphanages needed to ensure Protestant inculcation.

Protestants did not want their children to convert to Catholicism, especially at a time when most

Protestants saw Roman Catholicism as an Old World religion with adherents having an allegiance to a foreign head of state, the pope, rather than an allegiance to the United States.

The children were segregated by gender in the dormitories and playrooms but ate meals together in the dining hall mirroring a modified family dynamic when possible. As a result of economic downturns, endemic illness, and parental desertion, the needs of the orphanage continued to keep pace with community needs. By 1920, the number of children, most of whom were half-orphans, approached 150.72 Such a large population of children required that they be kept busy and monitored for physical, and behavioral well-being. In keeping with the GPOH motto, the eventual goal of the GPOH was to send children into the outside world who were accountable for becoming self-supporting citizens of good moral character.

Before passage of the 1921 Bing Act in the state of Ohio which required children to attend school from ages six to eighteen, institutionalized children were often outplaced to private homes where they were trained to help with domestic duties or apprenticed to a trade. Welfare visits to these wage homes were conducted by members of the orphanage’s Out-placed

Children’s Committee and both the employing family and the child were interviewed to ensure that everyone was satisfied with the placement.73 The orphanage received and invested the child’s salary until the child left the supervision of the orphanage, at which time they received

71 “Lane Rebels Who Came to Oberlin,” Oberlin.edu, http://www2.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/LaneDebates/RebelTable.html. 72 Mss 1043, Box 1, Folder 9, General Protestant Orphan Home Records, 1849-1970, Cincinnati Museum Center. 73 “A Century of Service: November 29, 1949,” Mss 1043, Box 6, Folder 5, General Protestant Orphan Home Records, 1849-1970, Cincinnati Museum Center. 118

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the wages they had previously earned.74 As indicated by the admission and dismissal records of

the home during the period of 1890 to 1930, approximately fifty percent of the children who

reached the age of thirteen were outplaced to such wage homes and an additional twenty-six

percent were employed by the orphanage. Only eighteen percent of the orphans thirteen or older were returned to a parent. The remaining orphans (approximately six percent) died from diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis, or found their way into the city’s juvenile justice system, typically as a result of repeatedly running away from the orphanage or private wage home.75

Early administrators of the GPOH facility came from within the Protestant laity, but 1870

marked the start of a period of instability. Long-term supervisor, “Mrs. Pfefflin left to be married to Mr. Fels in 1875.”76 Her sister-in-law, assistant supervisor Fanny Pfefflin, remained and

Sophie Finne was hired as supervisor: “But in a very short time Miss Finne resigned & the entire

management was given to Fanny Pfefflin.”77 Fanny resigned in 1877 with “a very fine record.”78

The next supervisor, “Mr. Kreyter” was hired from a similar position at an orphanage in

Indiana.79 As the records of the GPOH indicate, however:

there was very much discord & argument during his 14 months of ruling between him & servants – also Rev. Ruoff of St. John’s in Mt. [Auburn] … all came to a very sudden end for him when the board of the Home demanded his resignation at once – after a night of intoxication & annoyance of several members of the Home. Police protection was gotten untill (sic) he ‘cleard’ (sic) out … “Rev. Ruoff & Mr. Clodins took charge of the Home until the new man was procured … the council voted for Mr. Christ. Jahres, wife & daughter, all three of whom worked hard for

74 Ibid. Historically, in the state of Ohio, children were appointed a court guardian until they reached the age of 21. Before 1852, the cases were managed through the appropriate county’s Court of Common Pleas and after 1852 through the county’s Probate Court. 75 “Admissions and Dismissals,” Vol. 56, General Protestant Orphan Home Records, 1849-1970, Mss 1043, Cincinnati Museum Center. 76 “Outline of the German Protestant Orphan Home Proceedings from Year 1871-1880.” Box 1, Folder 5, General Protestant Orphan Home Records, 1849-1970, Mss 1043, Cincinnati Museum Center. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 119

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our home. Many special sessions were held by the council & choose (sic) the right one.80

The Jahres family was well regarded, but their unexpected resignation within a few years ushered in a period of unwelcome attention to the orphanage. All reformers were not what they appeared to be, including the minister from Germany with the stellar resume, that almost made

him seem too good to be true.

Adolph Foith was a Lutheran minister born in Heidsdorf, in the Germany territory of

Saxony in 1841. He graduated from the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Kronstadt, Saxony

in 1860. In flattering stories from the pages of the Cincinnati Enquirer, readers learned that Foith

spent several years in the pastorate of churches across Germany and Austria. In 1886, he

immigrated to St. Louis, Missouri where he became administrator of the city’s German

Protestant Orphan Asylum, but he resigned within two years to assume the pulpit of a Lutheran

church in Illinois. In 1890, he became minister of Immanuel Church in Cincinnati’s Fairmount

neighborhood but left this position in 1893 to become administrator of the Altenheim,

Cincinnati’s German Protestant Home for the Aged, his fifth position in seven years. The

GPOH’s board of trustees recruited Foith specifically because of his significant professional and

social welfare administrative experience. The trustees believed they had finally found the right

person in Foith to fill the void at the helm of the GPOH. For his part, Foith promised to introduce

reforms that streamlined operations, reduce costs, and attend to the spiritual salvation of the

wards of the orphanage. Consequently, in 1895, he was appointed superintendent of the GPOH,

it did not take long, however, before his backstory began to unravel and upend the sanctity of the

GPOH.

80 Ibid. 120

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In 1899, just after his contract with the orphanage was renewed, rumors began to surface that illuminated Foith’s true character. According to coverage in the Cincinnati Enquirer, he was accused of abusing four of the older female orphans. Moreover, his wife died under mysterious circumstances about the same time, attributed to her previously undisclosed “addiction to morphine.”81 Presumably, either Foith’s subterfuge or previous employers’ deficiency in due diligence allowed the details of his departure for the United States in the mid-1880s to remain murky for more than a decade. Three members of the orphanage’s board of trustees finally undertook the long overdue investigation into Foith’s past and uncovered allegations that he had, in fact, routinely engaged in criminal behavior. His proclivity for misconduct was first exposed when he embezzled funds from the Kranken Kasse (the fund for the sick) at his home church in

Saxony.82 The GPOH trustees also found that at his next position, he “swindled numerous widows and orphans, committed bigamy, and killed one of his wives.”83 He and his surviving wife fled to Vienna and from there to America. His ability to convincingly deceive otherwise discerning individuals “almost resulted in a split among the German Protestant ministers of

Cincinnati,” those who believed in his innocence pitted against those who did not.84 Foith allegedly poisoned himself before he was arrested by the Cincinnati police.

81 “Slave to a Baneful Drug: That May Have Rendered Him Irresponsible: Was Supt. Foith of German Protestant Orphanage: Whose Suicide Followed Revelations of His Infamy: Disclosures of His Life Record Stamp Him a Villain: Meeting of Trustees of Orphan Society Last Evening – A Terribly Deplorable Affair,” Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), Wed., Nov. 15, 1899, 12. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 121

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Fig. 15 – “‘Slave to a Baneful Drug,’ Cincinnati Enquirer, Nov. 15, 1899, 12.”85

According to coverage in the Cincinnati Enquirer following his death, Foith was a child abuser, a cocaine addict, and an accomplished confidence man who deceived many of his fellow ministers. He was magnetic but malignant, and evidence that not every reformer had pure motives.86 Members of the GPOH board became the subject of inquiry from within German

Protestant church circles for not having prevented Foith’s abuse of the children.87 This was a cautionary tale for the GPOH and other child-saving institutions. Confidence men came to prominence in the years following the Civil War. Rather than rehabilitate themselves when they were in danger of being discovered, many simply changed their frocks from the cravat of a businessman to, in the case of Adolph Foith, the collar of a minister.88 Foith’s criminal penchant

85 "Slave to a Baneful Drug," Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), Nov. 15, 1899, 12. 86 Young, The Age of Charisma, 21-25. 87 “Foith’s Life Will be Revealed: German Orphan Asylum Officials Declare: Significant Article Published in Protestant Church Journal: Old Charges from Germany Will be Reiterated to Sustain Opponents of Ex-Superintendent,” Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), Nov. 25, 1899, 8. 88 Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (Yale University Press, 1989), 22-23. 122

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found an outlet in the church and a church-sponsored orphanage: “Ministers had begun to shore

up their failing status by claiming major responsibility for forming the character of the rising

generation in the young … and so, when ministers exalt the belief and practice of Christianity as

the one highway to the moral life of individuals and nations, it is equally germane to observe

with some care whether or not the clergy make good their claims in their own persons.”89

Fig. 16 – “Crimes of Preachers of the United States and Canada, Cover.”90

The 750-page book, Crimes of Preachers of the United States and Canada was published by the

Truth-Seeker Company and sold for $2.00 a copy. Adolph Foith merited a mention for

“debauching little girls …” in the book’s tenth edition.91 It was a turn of the century effort to

publicize those pastors, ministers, and priests who had violated criminal law or social standards,

and been removed from office. The Truth-Seeker Company was the brainchild of freethinker and entrepreneurial firebrand DeRobigne Mortimer (D. M.) Bennett. A native of Illinois and former

Shaker, Bennett challenged organized religion and free speech restrictions at every turn. His

89 Ibid., 22. 90 Crimes of Preachers of the United States and Canada, 10th ed. (The Truth Seeker Company, 1913), Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57764/57764-h/57764-h.htm. 91 Ibid., n.p. 123

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weekly Truth Seeker magazine had 50,000 subscribers by the mid-1870s including Mark Twain,

and Bennett’s publications ran afoul of United States Postal Inspector Anthony G. Comstock.

Bennett was tried, convicted, and sent to federal prison in Albany, New York for thirteen months

for mailing a pro-free love pamphlet.92 The Foith affair brough an uncomfortable level of

scrutiny, not only to the GPOH, but to the city as well. Conservative, parochial Cincinnati had

crossed a humiliating line that no one wanted, or expected. Rehabilitation of the GPOH’s

reputation took years and the singular dedication of superintendent Herman Rabius who

succeeded Foith. Rabius successfully directed operations of the home for almost fifteen years

before he retired.

Pittsburgh

Like Cleveland, Pittsburgh’s early efforts at child-saving meant depositing orphans in the city’s almshouse. Pittsburgh constructed its first facility for housing the poor in 1818 to accommodate westward bound travelers stranded in the city without the funds to continue their journey. Its successor, the Allegheny County Poorhouse, was built in Shaler Township along the

Monongahela River. The new facility offered the city and county expanded inmate capacity, where they also were able to isolate the poor from the general population. An institution that once temporarily housed immigrants who had exhausted resources to continue on their journeys, now housed nearly 100 adults and children, including infants, among dozens of adult criminals, usually vagrants, and those who suffered from mental illness and various disabilities.93 In its next

location, completed in the early 1870s, the workhouse, which replaced “poorhouse” in the

92 Roderick Bradford, D.M. Bennett, The Truth Seeker (New York: Prometheus Books, 2006). Also see Christian Goodwillie, “Truth Seeker on the Holy Mount: DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett’s Descent from the Shaker Feast Ground,” Commercial Societies, 38:1 (2018), 31-57. 93 “Allegheny County Poorhouse,” 1850 United States Federal Census, Ancestry.com, 106-07. https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/8054/?keyword=Allegheny+County+Poorhouse&residence =_shaler+township-allegheny-pennsylvania-usa_12541. 124

24:11 lexicon, came to be referred to as Marshalsea, after the debtor’s prison in the Southwark neighborhood of London—it benefited little by the association. Eventually, stories of dire conditions in the state’s workhouses, including Marshalsea, became public knowledge and

“officials realized that the chaotic almshouses were a terrible place to raise children … one of the greatest problems with keeping children in almshouses was that there was no provision for education. Since the children remained barely literate, poverty continued through the generations.”94 In 1883, Pennsylvania passed legislation prohibiting the housing of children in prisons, poorhouses, and asylums intended for adults but the “directors of almshouses [including

Marshalsea] did not want to separate families, and performed ‘paper’ discharges and admissions on the same day.”95 In this way, children remained in the institution (and with their parent) until the parent’s release.

94 Christine O’Toole, “From Almshouses to Excellence: A History of Child Welfare in Allegheny County,” Allegheny County Department of Human Services (Allegheny County DHS, 2013), 4-5. 95 Kathy Leahy quoted in O’Toole, 5. In addition, the United States Census Records for 1890, 1900, and 1910, reflect that children were still resident in these institutions after the passage of the 1883 law. In most cases, they were under the age of three and shared a surname with a female inmate of child-bearing age, assumed to be the child’s mother. “Allegheny, PA 1850-1910 Census for Poorhouse, Workhouse, and City Home & Insane Asylum,” Pittsburgh Old Newspaper Project Updates, http://sites.rootsweb.com/~paallent/page11/page11.html. 125

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Fig. 17 – “Allegheny County Workhouse, n.d.”96

This idealized image of Marshalsea, the Allegheny County Workhouse, is an exemplar of many

imposing nineteenth century institutions that were simultaneously intimidating and grand. Inside,

however, were hundreds of human inmates, from newborns to the elderly. The state also

operated regional reform schools for children who had experiences with the police and justice

system. The workhouse was located just outside the suburb of Blawnox, along the Allegheny

River, northeast of downtown. In her 1907 study Pittsburgh as a Foster Mother, author and social worker Florence L. Lattimore, criticized the paucity of humane care for the city’s vulnerable children:

This total omitted the 320 children whom the Juvenile Court Association reported as sent from this county or from the state to correctional schools situated elsewhere because Allegheny County or Pennsylvania as a whole lacked provision for them. It did not take into account the 1,000 delinquent children constantly under the care of probation officers and those held in the detention rooms of the juvenile court. Nor did it include the undeterminable number of destitute under aged girls who drifted into the numerous rescue homes which were filled most of the time by older inmates.97

96 “Allegheny County Workhouse,” n.d., PennsylvaniaGenealogy.org, https://pennsylvaniagenealogy.org/allegheny/prison-records-from-the-allegheny-county-workhouse-and- inebriate-asylum.htm. 97 Florence L. Lattimore, Pittsburgh as a Foster Mother: A Concrete Community Study of Child-Caring Methods (Russell Sage Foundation, 1911), 1. 126

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Obviously, Pittsburgh needed alternatives to placing dependent children in the workhouse.

Children who had run afoul of the justice system needed rehabilitation rather than incarceration

and those children swept up by the system who had not committed a crime, other than not having

a home to go to or a family to care for them, deserved better. Even into the early twentieth

century, the state was a poor model for others to emulate for the compassionate and efficacious

treatment of children facing punishment for past deeds.

Community concern for orphaned and abandoned children not tainted by contact with the courts, was different. Such interest was at first focused on children from within that portion of the population that represented the Protestant majority. In these facilities, special care was taken to provide for Protestant children who had lost parents due to death or abandonment in line with the spirit of legislation enacted in 1713, still in force at the time that created the commonwealth’s first Orphan’s Court (Const. Art. 5, §7-16), which remained in effect until the passage of the

1883 Children’s Law. Within the scope of Article XII of the 1713 legislation, orphaned children were to be placed only with adults who shared a religious identification with those of the child’s late parents.98

The Orphan Asylum of Pittsburgh and the Allegheny, renamed the Protestant Orphan

Asylum of Pittsburgh and Allegheny (POAPA) in the 1870s, was founded in 1832 by Martha

(Mrs. Benjamin) Page and Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Joseph Stockton.99 Twenty-one men and fifteen of the city’s ladies of means and privilege were among the founding members of the

98 John Purdon, Jr. An Abridgement of the Laws of Pennsylvania, from the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred, to the Second Day of April, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Eleven with References to Reports of Judicial Decisions in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania (Farrand, Hopkins, Zantzinger, and Company, 1811), 410. 99 The orphanage was rebranded the Pressley House and is known today as Pressley Ridge, a facility that offers residential and outpatient treatment for adolescents, adoption and foster services, and family counseling throughout the Appalachian Region. “Who We Are,” PressleyRidge.org, http://pressleyridge.org/whoweare/htm. 127

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organizing orphan society and all were members of either Presbyterian, Lutheran, or Baptist

congregations.100 The asylum was the first such institution west of the Allegheny Mountains and

it opened its first state-chartered orphanage in Allegheny City in 1837, replacing the non- chartered orphan home it operated between 1832 and 1837. Clearly, their Protestant faith brought these men and women into contact with one another but their concern for the children among

their co-religionists is presumed to have motivated them to action. The minutes of the meetings

of the Board of Managers reflect a widely-held belief of those present that they were best suited to determine appropriate care for the less fortunate. As the religious and ethnic makeup of the city began to diversify, tolerance of those who did not fit neatly into the Protestant slot diminished significantly. Providing for the children of Protestant birth became paramount in the

Protestant community. The board of managers of the POAPA determined which children were a good fit for its facility. It its efforts to maintain a population that was white and Protestant, it

“removed children who were ‘shadowed’ and either transferred ‘Papist children’ to a Catholic orphanage or baptized the children Presbyterians or Baptists to insure that they belonged” with the POAPA.101

The POAPA was not only an orphanage for children who had lost one or both parents, it

also served as a boarding house for children whose parent or parents were unable to care for

them for brief periods of time, and yet did not wish to relinquish their parental rights. These

parents paid the asylum for their children’s room and board at a rate established by the Board of

Managers. The By-Laws articulated that failing to make payments for the care of their children

jeopardized the child’s continued residence in the orphanage with an overt threat that “the

100Julie L. Smith, “Child Care, Institutions and the Best Interest of the Child: Pittsburgh’s Protestant Orphan Asylum and Home for Friendless Children, 1832-1928,” PhD Diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 1994 (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 9509074), Table 2.1 “Foundations of the POA and HF,” 73-75. 101 Ibid., 86-87. 128

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children shall be indentured to the Board of Managers by the Overseer of the Poor.”102 The

parents and guardians of children whose fate it was to remain in the asylum until they reached

the age of dismissal, had already surrendered “all claims to their future disposal.”103

For the first half century of the POAPA’s operations, it benefited from its politically well-connected founders who were able to secure funds from Harrisburg to supplement fundraising efforts in the Pittsburgh community and children who were public charges were housed in private institutions. In 1878, the POAPA became one of a handful of institutions in the state of Pennsylvania that became an official home for wards of the state. This designation enshrined the position that the POAPA had held with politicians in Harrisburg since 1832.104 The

1883 state law that placed limitations on the facilities where children were accommodated was the first attempt by the state in more than a century to institute greater control over the care of orphans. It reflected that more than just a minor attempt to intervene in 1900 when the state banned non-secular organizations from receiving state funds without a super-majority vote from both houses of the state legislature: “No appropriation shall be made to any charitable or educational institution not under the absolute control of the commonwealth, other than normal school(s) established by law for the professional training of teachers for the public schools of the state, except by a vote of two-thirds of all the members elected to each house.”105 Such

restrictions meant that securing funding for sectarian facilities had become a significant

challenge.

102 Art. II, §3, “By-Laws of the Orphan Asylum of Pittsburgh and the Allegheny,” March 20, 1834. 103 Art. II, §2, “By-Laws.” 104 Smith, vii. 105 Amendments to the Constitution, Art. 3, §17 “Appropriations to Charities,” The Statute Law of the State of Pennsylvania from the Year 1700 to 1903 (with the Laws of 1905 in the Appendix) Compiled in 1811 by John Purdon, Thirteenth Edition, Compiled, Annotated, and Edited by Ardemus Stewart, Vol. I (George T. Bisel Company, 1903), 164. 129

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A second Protestant orphanage, the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Home for the Friendless, was incorporated and chartered in 1862, exclusively by members of the Second Presbyterian

Church. The original intent was to care for children deserted by one or both parents, but with the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, the number of destitute half-orphans increased alarmingly, both in children whose fathers had enlisted in the Union Army and later, those whose fathers had lost their lives in battle.106 The year following the end of the war, the Pittsburgh and Allegheny

Home for the Friendless changed its name to Pressley House, but its mission remained the same.

The name was changed to reflect the orphanage’s relocation to Pressley Street in the city’s East

Allegheny neighborhood across the river from downtown Pittsburgh. Boys under the age of eight and girls under the age of thirteen “neglected or deserted by their parents or guardians” were to be “furnish(ed) a home, food, clothing and schooling.”107 According to the organization’s amended By-Laws, the children of Pressley House were eligible for placing out as apprentices and indentured workers on a three-month-trial basis to individuals and families where their living situations were to be monitored by the Admission and Dismission Committee.108 Like the outplacements from other institutions, these children and adolescents were monitored by volunteers who visited the homes and businesses where the children had been placed.

Similar to settings in Cleveland and Cincinnati where children were outplaced, the children from Pressley House often remained in these outplacing or wage homes for several years, based on favorable results of regular home check investigations to be conducted every six months, and maintaining regular contact with the child and the employer.109 Nevertheless, the

106 “History” PressleyRidge.org, https://www.pressleyridge.org/history.html. 107 Art. II, “Constitution of the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Home for the Friendless,” 1861, Pressley Ridge Records. 108 Section I, “By Laws of Pressley House, As Amended,” 1878, Pressley Ridge Records. 109 Ibid. 130

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records of Pressley House reflect that a number of these children were returned to the home or

took it upon themselves to remedy what can be assumed were difficult placements, by running

away from the outplacement. The files of these children do not reflect whether the home

attempted to locate the children or simply closed the file and moved on. Pressley Ridge changed

its focus in 1880, relinquishing the care of abandoned and neglected children to facilities like the

POAPA. It decided to take in those children “who could enter no other asylum, or home, that we

know of.”110 In this way, Pressley House ensured its viability and built its reputation with

Progressive reformers who directed child-saving efforts into the twentieth century.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nearly seventy orphanages,

homes for unwed mothers, foundling hospitals, children’s homes, and industrial schools were

founded and operated in Pittsburgh and the surrounding counties, sponsored through taxpayer

contributions, private donations, and religious institutions.111 Like the number of institutions

110 “Pressley House Annual Report – 1881,” quoted in Smith, 177. 111 Pittsburgh area institutions included: Allegheny City Home, Allegheny County Industrial School and Home for Boys, Auberle Memorial, Avery Trade School, Baptist Orphanage and Home, Bethesda Home, B'nai B'rith Orphanage for Children, Elizabeth A. Bradley Children's Home, Boys Industrial Home of Western Pennsylvania, W. Harry Brown Home for Boys, Children's Aid Society of Allegheny County, Children's Home Society of Pennsylvania, Children's Service Bureau, Inc., Children's Temporary Home and Day Nursery, Coleman Industrial Home for Colored Boys, Curtis Home for Women, Davis Home for Colored Children, Episcopal Church Home Association, Eudes Institute, Fairfax Baby Home, Faith Home, First Allegheny Day Nursery and Temporary Home, German Protestant Orphan Asylum, J. M. Gusky Hebrew Orphanage and Home of Western Pennsylvania, Holy Family Institute, Home for Colored Children, Home of the Good Shepherd, House of Refuge of Western Pennsylvania, Industrial Home for Crippled Children, Jewish Home for Babies and Children, Louise Home for Babies, Mayview State Hospital, Sarah Ann Mock Memorial Orphanage, Oakmont Home, Odd Fellows' Orphans' and Widows' Home, Orphans Home and Farm School of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Pennsylvania Soldiers' Orphan Schools, Pittsburgh and Allegheny Home for the Friendless, Pittsburgh Florence Crittenton Home and Rescue Association, Pittsburgh Home for Babies, Pittsburgh Newsboys' Home, Protestant Home for Boys, Protestant Orphan Asylum of Pittsburgh and Allegheny, Pythian Home of Pennsylvania, Queen Esther Home for Children, Raphael Temporary Home, Roselia Foundling Asylum and Maternity Hospital, St. Ann's Day Nursery, St. Anthony's Village Orphanage, St. John's Lutheran Home, St. Joseph's German Orphan Asylum, St. Joseph's Protectory for Homeless Boys, St. Michael's Orphan Asylum, St. Paul's Orphans' Home, St. Paul's Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum of Pittsburgh, St. Peter's Evangelical Lutheran Orphans' Home, St. Rita Home, Sewickley Fresh Air Home, Soldiers' Orphan Home, Sunshine Home, Carmen Sylva Industrial Home, Tierman Children's Home, Toner Institute and 131

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suggest, some of these facilities operated for just a year or so, until the crisis for which they were

formed had passed or funding and community interest declined. There are few extant records

beyond the names of the institutions and the individuals/organizations who were responsible for

the day-to-day operations. These smaller, temporary-in-nature, solutions resulted from the loose coalition of community-minded citizens in Pittsburgh in the late nineteenth century. By comparison, other institutions withstood the changes in culture, law, and economics to operate into the twenty-first century. The segregation of children on ethnic, racial, and religious grounds was not unique to the city but more visible due to the city’s size and economic prominence.

These were institutions that grew over time, moving to larger locations and adapting to changes in economic conditions, demographic shifts, and ever-increasing regulatory measures. There were orphanages for Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and non-denominational Protestants,

Catholics, Irish Catholics, and German Catholics, Jews, and African Americans, from infants to adolescents. Pittsburgh’s child-saving institutions reflected the diversity of its ethnic and religious communities themselves.

***

This chapter opened with the slimmest of vignettes, just a few sentences to mark the

melancholic beginnings of the lives of three of the newest citizens of the Midwest. For reasons

that are possible to conjecture, but not to know, these birth mothers left their babies in very

public places, hoping that a stranger took pity on them and brought them safely to the authorities.

The origins of an abandonment were not always so mysterious, but they were almost always

Seraphic Home for Boys, Uniontown Soldiers' Orphan School, United Presbyterian Orphans' Home, Robert Boyd Ward Home for Children, Woodville State Hospital, and Zoar Home for Mothers, Babies and Convalescents. “A DIRECTORY OF ORPHANAGES FOR ALLEGHENY COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA AND SOME ADJACENT COUNTIES: Compiled by the Staff of the Pennsylvania Department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh,” http://www.info- ren.org/projects/btul/Pennsylvania/pastaff/ai/orphan.html. 132

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stories of tragedy or human failing. Midwesterners whose core ethnics revolved around qualities

like hard work, honesty, self-sufficiency, modesty, and generosity, were unwilling to allow

children to suffer, especially the very young. Altruism aside, the overriding communal concern

was that children who did not have a proper upbringing were unable to become productive

citizens.

Protestantism claimed roughly eighty percent of American religious adherents in 1900. In

a nation where freedom of religious choice and freedom from state-sponsored religion are enshrined in its organizing document, the U.S. Constitution, there are no guarantees of freedom from bias against, or hatred of, those whose path to God travels through different ecclesiastical

terrain. Humanity cannot be legislated. Regional tensions that swirled around religious

protectionism often overshadowed common humanity. Although they uniformly excluded

children who were not born to Protestant parents, the individuals who committed money, time,

and good intentions to shepherding children through life in an institutional setting were generally

well-meaning, even if they were not always paradigms of a caring, modern child-welfare

professional. Motivations for establishing these facilities ranged from very personal reasons,

representing an attempt to overcome personal grief at the loss of a child to Protestant ethics and

evangelism writ large. Often, these institutions operated with a stable, and principled

administrator whose record of accomplishment was a testament to their integrity. Occasionally,

however, the proximity to a captive population of vulnerable children and access to operating

funds proved too tempting for amoral individuals whose pretense to piety fooled donors and organizers alike.

Public institutions for the indigent, ill, and even criminal served as facilities to house orphaned and abandoned children. Public agencies, such as houses of refuge and reform operated

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24:11 concurrently with the placement of children with incarcerated parents in prisons, workhouses, and quasi-medical facilities for those with chronic physical or mental illness. Sectarian Protestant facilities founded to provide shelter for orphaned and abandoned children of Protestant families were often among the first facilities of any religious affiliation in these cities. Many of the original facilities strictly for children were affiliated with Protestants whether they were sponsored by members of coalitions of churches (Pittsburgh’s Protestant Orphan Asylum) or were organized by ethnic Protestant churches (Cincinnati’s German Protestant Orphan Home) or by private individuals (Cleveland’s Jones School and Home for Friendless Children). Protestants organized orphan societies in each of these cities from within the congregations of affluent churches representing a number of Protestant denominations. Each of these organizations became subject to the calls for standardization of care and methodology that grew louder in the

Progressive Era. Some of them reacted by meeting the challenge of change and exist in some form today. Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh are each home to at least one twenty-first century public facility that began its institutional life as a Protestant orphanage that meets the needs of at-risk children and their families. Other facilities were shuttered because they did not, or were unable to accomplish the changes required to ensure that the mission continued.

Progressive Protestants played a role in the child-saving institutions of Pittsburgh,

Cleveland, and Cincinnati where their influence was visible, and at times connected to elements of secular authority. The institutions that survived were the most able to adapt to changes at the local, state, and eventually, the national level. These institutions had been historically discriminating in who they helped, and immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and children with physical and emotional disabilities, were not on the preferred list of children admitted. Ironically, their recipe for institutional survival in the Progressive Era and beyond forced them to reevaluate and

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Protestants, leading to differences in diocesan institutions and those run by the laity, or women religious, outside of direct diocesan control.

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Chapter 4 A Light of Renewal: Nineteenth Century American Catholicism

The light the age requires for its renewal can only come from the same source, cultivation of the Holy Spirit in the individual soul.

Isaac Thomas Hecker1

Isaac Hecker’s reflection came during the mid-nineteenth century, just before the dawning of the

Gilded Age, yet it was a prescient observation for American Catholics who chose to nurture the

Holy Spirit in their own souls to find comfort in an increasingly complicated world. For

American Catholics, the challenges and opportunities of the Progressive Era coincided with the trials of reconciling religious devotion with citizenship in a constitutional republic that valued individual liberty. Most of the Catholics in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh spent their days outside the halls of power where the rules of this contest were handed down. Some of them were at the forefront of individual and communal outreach to aid dependent children, but the increasing noise on the periphery complicated those efforts unnecessarily. Tragically, some

Catholics were burdened by personal troubles so deep they no longer had the strength to call on

the Holy Spirit for renewal. This chapter will examine efforts of American Catholics as they

participated in child saving, and their interconnected relationships with diocesan authorities,

desperate parents, and dependent children.

There are no surviving records of the automobile crash that took the life of widower

August G. Moorbrink on November 9, 1912 in Cincinnati. The weather had been clear, with

brisk west winds and a high about 40 degrees. Cincinnati roads of bricks, cobbles, or macadam

1 Isaac Thomas Hecker, “External Mission of the Paulist Community,” The Paulist Vocation (Paulist Press, 2000), 149. 136

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and dirt, were dry.2 Except for the time and location of Moorbrink’s funeral mass, obituaries that

appeared in The Cincinnati Enquirer and the German-language Tägliches Cincinnatier

Volksblatt (Cincinnati Daily People’s Journal) were silent as to the details of the accident itself.3

This calamity left the four Moorbrink children orphaned, but they were not among those sent to

the House of Refuge or abandoned to the streets. Only the day before the accident, Moorbrink

had executed his last will and testament.4 Under the terms of his will, he directed that his

children be placed in the St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum in Cincinnati’s Bond Hill neighborhood.

The Moorbrink children were admitted to St. Aloysius on November 21, 1912, the day

after their father’s will was probated.5 Unlike most of the children who spent all, or even just a part of their childhood in St. Aloysius, the children brought with them a small inheritance.6

Otherwise, their story turns out to be heartbreakingly similar to that of many others who were

inmates of St. Aloysius and other institutions. According to orphanage records, the children’s

mother, Cecilia, died from consumption (tuberculosis) a few years before August’s fatal

accident. Most of the children in St. Aloysius were full-orphans like the Moorbrinks, having lost both parents. Three of the Moorbrink children remained under the mindful eye of the Sisters of

2 “Weather” Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), Sat. Nov. 9, 1912, 1. http://cincinnati.newspapers.com/image/33355332. 3 “August Moorbrink,” Hamilton County Genealogical Society, 19th Century Death Notices, page 726. http://hcgsohio.org/upload/files/Local%20Records/Death%20Notices%20and%20Obits/HCGS- 19thCenturyDeathNotices-AbbreviatedIndex-M-O.pdf. Despite its name, the document also includes death notices from well into the twentieth century. It indicates that the death notice for Moorbrink was printed in the Tägliches Cincinnatier Volksblatt. The date of his death was discovered in Ohio Deaths 1908-1932, 73, Ancestry.com, http://interactive.ancestry.cm/5763/ ohvr_d_1911_2-1987?pid+5957518; “August Moorbrink,” Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), Mon. Nov. 11, 1912, 7. http://cincinnati.newspapers.com/image/33355424. 4 “August Moorbrink,” Ohio, Wills and Probate Records, 1786-1998, Wills, Vol. 112-121, 1912-1913, Ancestry.com, http://interactive.ancestry.com/8801/005445974_00710?pid+9164975. 5 “August Moorbrink,” Ohio, Wills and Probate Records, 1786-1998. 6 In fact, according to orphanage records regarding children with inheritances, among the thousands of orphans who were cared for at St. Aloysius, only a dozen children (or sibling groups) entered with any type of financial legacy. Records of the St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, MS 1098, Box 17, Items 3-13, Cincinnati Museum Center. 137

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Notre Dame until they reached the age of dismissal. The third son, Joseph, was on a different path. He was dismissed to the custody of Cincinnati jeweler and clock manufacturer Frank

Herschede in April of 1920. Joseph Aloysius Moorbrink was just about to turn sixteen. He was one of two dozen children (twelve girls and twelve boys) who were taken by Frank and Sadie

Herschede from St. Aloysius over a thirty-year period and offered a job and a place to live. Some of them worked in the Herschede family home and others in the Herschede Hall Clock Company factory located on Plum Street downtown.

For one family to take twenty-four children from an orphanage was extraordinary. What were the motivations that undergirded those efforts? Was the release of children to individuals or families such as the Herschedes emblematic of larger social issues, or of something else altogether? Was the Herschedes’ experience replicated in Cleveland and Pittsburgh as well?

Before we explore cases of Catholics who interceded in the lives of predominantly Catholic orphans to provide care and guidance, it is critical to understand the lived experiences of

American Catholics at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What cultural obstacles did they face? How well did church doctrine mesh with American ideas about religion and freedom? How were Catholic immigrants to resolve those conflicts between their new national

identity and the legacy of their faith? Like all American Catholics, Catholics in the Midwest

needed to negotiate their dual identities as loyal Americans and devout Catholics. The challenges

of that negotiation varied in the cities of this study as Catholicism established its place on what

was contested spiritual ground.

Although the Catholic population continued its expansion in the United States during the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholicism itself remained in the minority compared to

America’s Protestant majority. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Catholics

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tended to settle as they traveled, in small, cohesive groups. The earliest Catholics in what became

the Midwest were missionary priests, attached to the companies of French explorers. Mass

immigration to the region began in the early nineteenth century with mostly native-born

American Catholics from Maryland and eastern Pennsylvania. Within a few decades, they were joined by other Catholics immigrating directly from Europe. First were families and individuals from German lands followed by the Irish, Italians, Polish, and others.7 Priests at the vanguard of

missionary efforts in these outposts identified sites where John Carroll, the Archbishop of

Baltimore, might permit the establishment of a parish.8 Catholic communities in the United

States grew from five percent of the total population in 1850 to seventeen percent by 1906—an

increase of three hundred and forty percent.9 This rapid growth was marked by the number of parishes found in these cities between 1880 and 1930: Cincinnati had nearly sixty, Cleveland had nearly forty, and Pittsburgh more than fifty.10 They also endured comparable episodes of

religious bigotry and suspicion, whether grounded in simple ignorance or pure malice.

Members of certain American political factions ratcheted up the nativist rhetoric that

betrayed their distrust of those who looked, thought, or worshipped differently. Among those at

7See, for example, Timothy Kelly, “Pittsburgh Catholicism,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 18:4, Religious Geography: The Significance of Regions and the Power of Places, Part Two (Fall, 2000); “A List of All the Roman Catholics in Pennsylvania, 1757,” in A. A. Lambing, History of the Catholic Church in the Dioceses of Pittsburg and Allegheny from Its Establishment to Its Present Time (Benziger Brothers, 1880); “A Portrait and a History: The Archdiocese of Cincinnati,” CatholicCincinnati.org, http://www.catholiccincinnati.org/about-us-2/a-portrait/; Rev. J. A. Burns, The Growth and Development of the Catholic School System in the United States (Benziger Brothers, 1912); and Guide to Catholic Records about Native Americans in the U.S., Vol. 1: Eastern United States: Ohio: OH-2, Marquette University, http://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/NativeGuide/OH-2.ph 8 Baltimore, Maryland was the first diocese of the Catholic Church in America, established by Pope Pious VI in 1789. 9 Julie Byrne, “Roman Catholics and Immigration in Nineteenth Century America,” NationalHumanitiesCenter.org, http://www.nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/nroman.htm. 10 Source Information for Cincinnati; The Cleveland Directory for the Year Ending July, 1900, 29th Annual Issue (The Cleveland Directory Company, 1899), 1472; and Directory of Pittsburgh, Allegheny, and Vicinity for the Year 1900 (R. L. Polk & Co. and R. L. Dudley, 1900), 104-105. 139

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the front of this movement were the successors to the American Party, or Know Nothings. Their

enmity was grounded in the fear that infiltration by European Catholics weakened the nation, and

that members of the working class lost jobs and social standing to immigrants. Anti-Catholic anxiety diminished, but did not disappear, in the years heading toward the twentieth century. In fact, anti-Catholic animosity was simply appended to a long list of complaints by those with nativist sentiments. Despite the onslaught, a shift began to occur within certain segments of the church to become more American and more forward-thinking regarding church dogma.

Nativism played a more significant role in the daily lives of those in the Northeast and

Atlantic seaboard than it did in the daily lives of most Midwesterners but, the Midwest still had

its share of anti-Catholic dogmatists and racists who did not hesitate to resort to coercion and

outright violence.11 These malcontents were met with equal passion by those who stood their

ground on the opposite side of each issue in contention: including public versus parochial

schooling, contested Catholic loyalty to the country, and temperance. The American Protective

Association (APA) had a negative impact on interreligious relationships in the late nineteenth

century and the Midwest uncharacteristically suffered the brunt of the abuse. An organization

that often met in secret, the APA was toxically anti-Catholic, as the following oath demonstrates:

I hereby denounce Roman Catholicism. I hereby denounce the Pope, sitting at Rome or elsewhere. I denounce his priests and emissaries and the diabolical work of the Roman Catholic church, and hereby pledge myself to the cause of Protestantism to the end that there may be no interference with the discharge of the duties of citizenship, and I solemnly bind myself to protect at all times, and with all the means in my power, the good name of the order and its members, so help me God. Amen.12

11 Donald L. Kinzer, “Oath of American Protective Association,” in An Episode in Anti-Catholicism: The American Protective Association. (University of Washington Press, 1964), 13. 12 Ibid. 140

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It is difficult to imagine finding common ground when this is your starting point. Most robust in the 1880s and 1890s, the APA attempted to meddle in the presidential election of 1896 when it accused the eventual winner, Ohio’s William McKinley, of being “the pope’s agent.” McKinley had been a thorn in the paw of the APA, nursed since McKinley was the state’s governor and ignored the group’s pressure not to appoint Catholics to state positions. McKinley’s biographer,

H. Wayne Morgan notes: “McKinley was a devout Christian and Methodist. But he thought religion was a private matter. It played no role in politics where it was divisive.” 13 The APA had no success with McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, either. While the APA faded into oblivion after the death of its founder in 1911, it was replaced by a more dangerous anti-

Catholic, antisemitic, anti-African American, anti-immigrant faction, the Second Ku Klux Klan.

The KKK returned first in rural Georgia, but the leadership of the resuscitated KKK staked out Evansville, Indiana, along the Ohio River, 220 miles southwest of Cincinnati, for its headquarters. In the early 1920s, it claimed a national membership of 250,000, with its largest chapter of a purported 50,000 members in Summit County, Ohio (Akron), located 30 miles south of Cleveland and 100 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. Its sixth largest chapter, with a claimed membership of more than 10,000 was headquartered in Dayton, Ohio just north of Cincinnati.

These were the Americans, many of them Midwesterners, who ate, slept, and spewed anti-

Catholic sentiment. Yet there were also strong anti-Catholic feelings held by those not considered to be small-minded. Social Gospeler Walter Rauschenbusch worried openly about the increasing population of Roman Catholics and the impact of such increase on the American polity.14 Two other notable Americans, Woodrow Wilson and Mark Twain, had evolving opinions about the Catholic faith. Early in his law school career in the 1880s, Wilson

13 H. Wayne Morgan, William McKinley and His America (Kent State University Press, 2003), 146. 14 See Chapter 2, n. 69. 141

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differentiated between what he saw as harmless “Roman Catholicism as a religion” and what he

viewed as problematic “Catholicism as a policy.”15 Regardless, Wilson’s chief of staff (from

1913 to 1921) and trusted friend, was Irish Catholic American Joseph Patrick Tumulty.

American humorist Mark Twain was also famously harsh in his written work toward

Catholicism, as in this excerpt from The Innocents Abroad:

… when the holy Mother Church became mistress of the barbarians, she taught them the error of their way … first by twisting their thumbs out of joint with a screw; then by nipping their flesh with pincers—red-hot ones, because they are the most comfortable in cold weather; then by skinning them alive a little, and finally by roasting them in public. They always convinced those barbarians. The true religion, properly administered, as the good Mother Church used to administer it, is very, very soothing … it is a great pity the playful Inquisition is no more.16

Nevertheless, even in The Innocents Abroad, Twain was generous in his description of true

religious piety and in his later years devoted efforts to what he considered his greatest work:

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896).17 Like Wilson, perhaps Twain’s criticism was

saved for Catholicism as policy not as religion.

A few of the reform movements that occurred during the Progressive Era were tangential

to Progressive social reforms. These reforms instead signaled a significant conflict that promised

to erode the doctrinal structure of the church during this time frame. In fact, the church was still

fighting the battles of the mid-nineteenth-century’s Vatican One, especially in the United States, when Pope Leo XIII issued Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (Witness to Our Good Will) a

generation later. This missive grew out of Vatican awareness that there was a growing affinity in

Catholic America for the ideas of Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, a founder of the Missionary

15 Barry Hankins, Woodrow Wilson: Ruling Elder, Spiritual President (Oxford University Press, 2016), Ebook, n.p. 16 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869), (SeaWolf Press, 2018), 213. 17 Aurele A. Durocher, “Mark Twain and the Roman Catholic Church,” Journal of the Central Mississippi Valley American Studies Association, 1:2 (Fall 1960), 32-43. 142

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Priests of St. Paul the Apostle (Paulists). In the United States, Hecker hoped to synthesize the

Catholic faith with American freedoms, ostensibly making both stronger, and he sought to plant the flag of American Catholicism in a fluid interpretation of church doctrine.18 Scholar Jay P.

Dolan contends Hecker was an outspoken proponent of “Manifest Destiny … but he gave it a

different twist. In his opinion, the providential destiny of America was realized only when

America became Catholic … he envisioned Catholicism transforming American society, but that

did not take place until Catholicism became more American.”19 Hecker understood the official

church position implicitly, but he tried to finesse a solution in the conflict of supremacy between

Catholicism and Americanism.20

The 1899 papal encyclical that responded to Hecker’s efforts was issued in the form of a

letter to James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, and a supporter of the late priest.21

However, the pope directed that the letter be distributed to all American bishops so that none

allowed themselves to continue to be enamored of Hecker’s ideas. Hecker was a native-born

American and an adult convert from Methodism to Catholicism, a decision reached after years of

personal religious upheaval and discovery. He studied for the priesthood in Belgium with the

Order of Redemptorists and was ordained in London in 1849. A few years later, he and three

other Redemptorist priests founded the Paulist order in the Diocese of New York.22 Their goal was to bring the Roman Church into harmony with the ideas of Americanism, a heretical view in

18 David J. O’Brien, Isaac Hecker: An American Catholic (State University of New York Press, 1992) and Joseph F. Gower, The “New Apologetics” of Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819-1888): Catholicity and American Culture (University of Notre Dame, 1978). 19 Jay Dolan, “Catholicism and American Culture,” in Jonathan D. Sarna, ed., Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream (University of Illinois Press, 1998), 69. 20 O’Brien, 113. 21 Ibid. 22 Hecker and his fellow priests had been removed by the head of the Redemptorist order in Rome, ostensibly for failing to obtain sufficient prior approval to travel. 143

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Catholic philosophy. At parish mission revival meetings of the Gilded Age, “Redemptorists and

Paulists were the itinerant preachers of the movement” in the Midwest and Hecker was a popular

speaker.23 In the late 1860s, he delivered a series of almost sixty lectures while traversing the

eastern half of the country, as far west as Missouri. He was accused by conservative, especially

European, Catholics of trying to undermine church authority by being a crypto-Protestant.24

Ironically, one of the goals of the Paulist mission was to convert Protestants to the Catholic faith.

Problems arose for Hecker, posthumously, when he became an inspirational figure to French

Catholics disillusioned by the call of Pope Leo XIII to accept the political authority of the French

Republic.25 The French translation of Hecker’s biography that had been widely circulated among

French Catholics, was sent to the pope leading him to issue Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae.

Hecker’s authority came from the fact that he was well-respected by his American colleagues and idolized by freedom-minded French colleagues—that made him potentially dangerous—

even in death.

Although the pope opened the letter to Gibbons, “Beloved Son,” he quickly turned to

more direct language:

We send to you by this letter a renewed expression of that good will which we have not failed … to manifest frequently to you and to your colleagues … and to the whole American people … We have … admired the noble gifts of your nation which enable the American people to be alive to every good work which promotes the good of humanity and the splendor of civilization … but rather to call attention to some things to be avoided and corrected … [and] to suppress certain contentions … among you to the detriment of the peace of many souls.26

23 James J. Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1981), 177. 24 Ibid., 113-115. 25 Ibid. 26 Pope Leo XIII, “Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae,” (1899) The Leonine Encyclicals, 1878-1902 (Agnus Dei Publishing, 2014). 144

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The pope reminded Gibbons that he had, on many occasions, written in support of the hierarchy

of the church in America and in support of the American people who he viewed as otherwise

devout Catholics. Nevertheless, this had been a qualified endorsement, not a blanket papal

approval of every action taken by the faithful, their spiritual guides, or the recent developments

that stirred up trouble in the Catholic ranks, regarding American challenges to Catholic

supremacy. He declared that the time had come to call out Hecker’s supporters among members

of the Catholic clergy, as well as a significant number of Catholic Americans, to account for their challenge to Roman church authority in what the pope viewed as misguided attempts to soften church dogma and practice:

The underlying principle of these new opinions is that, in order to more easily attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age … Many think that these concessions should be made not only in regard to ways of living, but even in regard to doctrines which belong to the deposit of the faith … and to tone down the meaning which the Church has always attached to them.27

In Hecker’s opinion, the light of renewal of the age was to come through the cultivation of the

Holy Spirit in the individual. To the pope, this renewal only came within the parameters of

church doctrine and dogma. He averred that Catholicism was willing, within limits, to accept

how the differences in location and circumstances at a particular moment may impact minor

aspects of the practice of faith, and echoed St. Paul’s own ideas about the universality of the

mission of the church:

The rule of life laid down for Catholics is not of such a nature that it cannot accommodate itself to the exigencies of various times and places … The Church has, guided by her Divine Master, a kind and merciful spirit, for which reason from the very beginning she has been what St. Paul said of himself: ‘I became all things to all men that I might save all.’28

27 O’Brien, 213-14. 28 Ibid. 145

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Yet the church, according to the pope, was unable to be all things to all people in order to win

new souls for the faith. He charged that American Catholics had been led away from the tenets of

the faith by the distractions of American liberty and individual freedom:

But, beloved son … there is even a greater danger and a more manifest opposition to Catholic doctrine and discipline in that opinion of the lovers of novelty, according to which they hold such liberty should be allowed in the Church, that her supervision and watchfulness being in some sense lessened, allowance be granted the faithful, each one to follow out more freely the leading of his own mind and the trend of his own proper activity. They are of opinion that such liberty has its counterpart in the newly given civil freedom which is now the right and the foundation of almost every secular state.29

Here, the pope reaffirms the supremacy of the church over all human concerns of the world including national ideas of individual liberty and freedom. It seemed reasonable to many

American Catholics that their faith was strengthened by American liberty. To the hierarchy of the Roman Church, however, national identity was always secondary to Catholic integrity. In conflicts between church doctrine and American values, the church retained primacy through divine right. Many conservative Catholics feared that Hecker’s outreach to convert Protestants signaled his attempt to bring Catholicism in line with Protestant ideology. Rather, Hecker thought that America was able to become a Catholic nation if the Vatican took a positive view of

what made America different into account, and leveraged that difference for the benefit of the

church.30

Several American newspapers ran stories of the pope’s fragile health in January of 1899

as he approached his 89th birthday. That coverage was overshadowed several weeks later with

the public release of the encyclical. Overwhelmingly, the coverage was limited to a reprinting of

the English translation of the encyclical in its format as a letter to Cardinal Gibbons. The only

29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 146

24:11 editorializing came in the lengthy headings that introduced the reprint in each paper. For example, from the New Orleans, Louisiana Times-Picayune:

The Letter of the Pope: Full Text of the Document made Public by Cardinal Gibbons His Holiness Does Not Approve of Americanism as Illustrated By the French Translation of the “Life of Father Hecker” The Rule of Life as Laid Down by the Vatican Council Cannot Be Changed to Suit the Exigencies of Time and Place: The Society of Paulists is Not Condemned by the Pope, But He Admonishes Them to Avoid Attacking the Religious Orders Which Have Done So Much Good31

This was a matter-of-fact headline in the major newspaper in a heavily Catholic city. This respectful coverage in the Times-Picayune is an interesting juxtaposition against that of New

York City’s The Sun, which took a more impertinent approach:

Pope Leo on Americanism: Full Text of His Recent Letter to Cardinal Gibbons Practically Condemns the Non-Catholic Missions as Carried on by the Paulist Fathers— Does Not Object to Secular Priests Bonding Together, But He Declares Such Communities Should Not Be Put Above The Regular Religious Orders—Active and Passive Virtues Compared32

The Baltimore Sun, the paper of record in Cardinal Gibbons’ archdiocesan see, took a more conciliatory tone:

Pope Leo’s Letter: Full Translation of the Roman Pontiff’s Famous Paper Addressed to Cardinal Gibbons: Views of ‘Americanism.’ Catholics’ Rule of Life: New Opinions Which Do Not Seem to Be in Accord With It Thoughtful Discussion of the Controversy Which Has Grown Out of The Translations of the Life of Father Isaac Thomas Hecker Founder of the Congregation of the Paulists, And of Opinions Concerning the Way of Leading a Christian Life33

31 Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), Fri., Feb. 24, 1899, 1. 32 The Sun (New York, New York), Fri., Feb. 24, 1899, 1. 33 The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, Maryland), Thu., Feb. 23, 1899, 1. 147

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Thought-provoking differences in the coverage surface in the largest newspapers in circulation in

the cities of this study as well. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s editorialized headline was a bit

cynical:

MINDS: Wrapped in Darkness: By Confounding of License and Liberty: Full Text of the Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII: Declares the Catholic Doctrine Broad Enough for All: Not Necessary for Advancement of Alleged Reforms: He Cannot Approve the Paulist as Interpreted, But Says Exigencies Will Be Met34

The tone is rife with suspicion of the pontiff’s directive to not pay attention to the Paulists’ outreach to make Catholicism more America-friendly. The reaction is a bit surprising considering the size of the Catholic community in Cincinnati at the time. A variation on the distrustful tone of the Enquirer, came from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s irreverent headline:

Law from Leo: Says Catholics Are Not to Be Compromised for Converts: Terms and Traditions Best: Says Laws of God Cannot Be Avoided to Please Men: Finds Peril in Hecker’s Ideas: American Catholics Termed the Objects of His Most Solicitous Love, The Pontiff Says He Admires Them, Hence This Warning to Be True to Their Faith— The Church, He Says, is Founded upon Christ’s Principles and No Shadow of Turning is Countenanced35

The only newspaper reviewed as part of this study that chose to cover the encyclical differently

was the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Their coverage was a rare article on the encyclical to appear on

Saturday, February 25, 1899, indicating, perhaps, that the paper had decided to offer coverage

that diverged from the standard of adding an attention grabbing headline over a reprint of the

pope’s missive. Instead, the Plain Dealer chose to reprint an excerpt of a letter from Rt. Rev.

34 Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), Fri., Feb. 24, 1899, 1. 35 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Fri., Feb. 24, 1899, 1. 148

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John Ireland, Archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota responding to the encyclical. The quick

succession of dates between the pope’s letter to Gibbons and Ireland’s response lends credence

to the likelihood that Gibbons and other American bishops knew of the encyclical well in

advance of its public release:

Strife Will Cease: The Pope’s Letter, Archbishop Ireland Says Will End Misunderstanding in this Country

Rome, Feb. 24 – The Ossevatore Romano today publishes the text of a letter from Archbishop Ireland to the Pope, regarding the Pontiff’s letter to Cardinal Gibbons on Americanism.

The Archbishop thanks the Pope for this proof of his esteem and love for American Catholics and says that now that the Pope has shed light on the situation, misunderstanding will cease, ‘for we are now able to determine the fault which some desire to conceal under the name of Americanism and define true Americanism, such as understood by Americans.’

Continuing, the Archbishop says, ‘The distinctions and explanations contained in the apostolic letter are so clear and precise that the peril which was not understood by all the people of the United States, but which I thought was to be feared can no longer present itself. In view of the extraordinary confusion of ideas and controversies raised, especially in France, by the ‘Life of Father Hecker’ there was need for the Supreme Pontiff to make his voice heard in order to enlighten and tranquilize the people’s minds.

With all the energy of my soul, I repudiate all the opinions the apostolic letter repudiates and condemns, those false and dangerous opinions whereto, as his holiness in brief say, certain people give the name of Americanisms.36

Surely, a more sincere mea culpa was difficult to find. No wonder conservative American

Catholics took the remonstrations from the pope to heart and withdrew into the safety of the faith. Research into major daily newspapers from across the country through March 31, 1899 reveals that no additional coverage of the encyclical or the community’s public response to it, if any, was published. The pope does not appear in a significant number of American newspapers

36 Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), Sat., Feb. 25, 1899, 4. 149

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again until the mid-summer of 1899, when his health again became an issue. For a time, Hecker

became persona non grata within the church, however, over time, his reputation was rehabilitated and he was designated as a “Servant of God” in 2008, one step on the ladder toward

sainthood.

Historian Jonathan D. Sarna explains the relationship between dominant Protestantism

and minority faiths in America as “a fundamental tension—between accommodation and

resistance, between absorption and retention, and between assimilation and identity—that is

characteristic of all groups that seek simultaneously to be part of and yet apart from the dominant

culture.”37 Catholics, like any American minority community, wanted to become American

without becoming Americanized. They wanted to be able to retain their faith and simultaneously

experience the benefits of American citizenship and freedoms. Yet, they found that where

America might be flexible, the Roman Catholic church was not. How did American Catholics

resolve these tensions without diluting either their faith or their freedom?

American Catholics were caught between their devotion to church dogma and enjoyment

of their American liberties. To a significant degree, conservative Catholics withdrew from the

American cultural milieu rather than enter Progressive Era reform movements, while more

liberal American Catholics risked sanction by their faith for following the call of American self-

determination. These Catholics were also caught between the tenets of their faith and the rights

associated with citizenship, but they opted not to choose between the two. In some sectors of

American Catholicism, the papal criticism cut deeply, forcing Catholics to disengage from their

secular citizenship and focus solely on spiritual concerns. Author Michael W. Cuneo has argued:

As if repentant for the theological deviations announced in the encyclical, the American church retreated in the years following its release into a cultural ghetto,

37 Jonathan D. Sarna, “Introduction” in Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream, ed. Sarna (University of Illinois Press, 1998), 5. 150

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effectively shutting itself off from the ideological enticements of the broader society. And within this enclosure was fostered a piety that left Catholics palpably different from their fellow Americans …38

The American Catholic church felt the sting of the moderate, but unyielding, rebuke of the pope.

Conservative Catholics usually found solace in trying to live up to the church’s expectations.

They wore this self-isolation as a sign of their devotion like the hair shirt of a martyr, a sign of their steadfastness. In that state of social seclusion, many of them shelved their love of American ideals, exchanging it for the comfort of Catholic religiosity. They were not participants in the

Social Gospel movement.39 To the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, American secular

Progressivism was a distraction and the Social Gospel movement, led predominantly by

Protestants, was an ideological deviation. The papal reproach stung American Catholics who had

exercised their freedoms in pursuit of upward socio-economic mobility and personal freedoms.

Closing themselves off from the wider society threatened opportunities for progress.

Historian Dierdre M. Moloney argues, Catholics worked hard to transcend the stereotype

that their co-religionists were, as a whole, illiterate, poor, and thereby second-class.40 A

charitable agenda that benefitted the wider community beyond their fellow Catholics offered

both a practical benefit and an aspirational one: providing for fellow citizens in need and earning

respectability as full members of American society. It was this second item on their agenda that

was vulnerable to charges of a sort of religious gamesmanship: “The impulse (to give more)

often arose when Catholics compared their charitable efforts with those of other groups,

particularly those of Protestants, but also those of Jews.”41 Charitable activities allowed

38 Michael W. Cuneo, The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditional Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 8. 39 See Chapter 2 for a more complete discussion on the Social Gospel movement. 40 Moloney, 5-6. 41 Ibid., 73. Also see the discussion in Chapter 5. 151

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Catholics to break down the walls of their status as “others” in American society and it offered

validation that they had earned inclusion in a society where Protestants dominated.42

Still, Catholics needed to be able to prove that their charitable efforts were more than just a superficial ploy to be more fully included in American society.43 Millions of poor Catholics

made their way to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In order that they

not become a public charge, and thereby threaten the advances made by prior generations of

immigrants, Catholic philanthropy began to diversify from the cases where women religious had

established a hospital, a home for the aged, or an orphanage, in coastal port cities. The first

Catholic orphanage founded west of the Allegheny Mountains, outside of seventeenth century

New Orleans, was established in Cincinnati.

Cincinnati

Flooding from heavy upriver rains was a recurring problem in the city until a system of dams and locks was built along the Ohio River late in the nineteenth century. Yet, it wasn’t the water overflowing the Ohio’s banks in Cincinnati that brought deadly Asiatic cholera to the city in 1832, but the thousands of canal and steamboat travelers who disembarked in the city, either to settle for good or stay just for the night. With this first major outbreak of cholera, caring for orphans created in the outbreak became a critical community concern. Cincinnati’s Catholic community had already begun to construct a safety net for orphans among its co-religionists but the efforts faced a number of social and financial challenges exacerbated by the effects of the epidemic.

The first Catholic orphanage in the city was St. Peter’s Orphan Asylum, founded in 1829 by two members of the Sisters of Charity religious order. It occupied a small building near St.

42 Moloney, 117. 43 Ibid., 113. 152

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Francis Xavier Church in downtown and operated under the official auspices of the Cincinnati

Archdiocese. The sisters admitted orphaned girls and boys, but early-nineteenth-century

American social norms looked askance at children of both genders being housed together and

boys were removed from the home almost immediately. These orphaned boys were left without

an option beyond the House of Refuge. Moreover, although the sisters were willing to take in non-Catholic children, the local Protestant community objected over fears that Protestant girls were coerced into converting to Catholicism and forced to become nuns.44 When the Sisters of

Charity moved the children into a new, larger location in Cumminsville in 1852, the name of the

orphanage was changed to honor St. Joseph. Boys were again admitted to the facility once

separate dormitories were built. There were more than two hundred orphans being cared for by

two dozen Sisters of Charity at this time. St. Joseph’s remained in Cumminsville, now known as

Northside, for the next century before relocating to its current site in Monfort Heights in 1962.

Its primary focus today is the care of children, adolescents, and young adults with emotional and

developmental disabilities.

In the years between the founding of St. Peter’s Orphan Asylum and its return to a policy

of admitting both girls and boys when it became St. Joseph’s, the German Catholic community

based at Holy Trinity parish, convened organizational meetings to address the issue of orphaned

Catholic boys. In 1837, Swiss-born Father John Martin Henni, the pastor of Holy Trinity, joined together with a small, influential group of his parishioners, to discuss ways to provide for these boys who had been removed from St. Peter’s. They named the organization “The Society of St.

44 These fears would reach a level of wanton paranoia just after the turn of the twentieth century exploited by anti-Catholic tabloids such as The Menace, published in Peoria, Illinois. At the height of its popularity, subscriptions reached 1.8 million. The Midwest was a prime spot for readership of the paper. For an excellent essay on this publication, see Justin Nordstrom, “A War of Words: Childhood and Masculinity in American Anti-Catholicism, 1911-1919,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 20:1, History and Gender (Winter, 2002), 57-81. 153

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Aloysius” in honor of St. Aloysius Gonzaga, the patron saint of Catholic youth, and planned to operate with private donations, outside of diocesan control.45 The Society first began by outplacing eight orphaned boys in foster homes, and the placements were monitored by a committee that included Henni and Catholic lay members of the St. Aloysius Orphan Society.

These placements proved complicated and problematic, however, and the members of the society quickly recognized that the needs of the boys were better served in a communal facility.46 Such thinking aligned with the German Waisenhaus movement that promoted institutional care over foster family care and that had gained an increasing number of supporters in the United States during this time.47

The Sisters of Charity took on administration of the St. Aloysius facility while they continued to operate St. Peter’s. Unfortunately, the population of orphaned boys soon outgrew the facility. Contemporaneous with orphan overpopulation experience at St. Aloysius, Henni was named Bishop of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and his successor in Cincinnati, Father Joseph

Ferneding, oversaw the construction of a new facility for the St. Aloysius orphans. Without warning, before the children even took up residence in the new facility, the Sisters of Charity withdrew from their role in all “boys’ asylums and boys’ schools” across the nation, not just at

St. Aloysius. The society turned staffing of the orphanage over to a lay administrator and by

1848, fifty-three boys were in her care.48 When the asylum outgrew this location, it planned for another move, its last, that followed the route of other German Americans from Over-the-Rhine

45 Holy Trinity parish, first organized in 1834, was the “first German parish and second Catholic parish in Cincinnati.” Holy Trinity closed its doors in 1958 and was merged into the St. Peter-in-Chains parish. “Parish Profiles: All Saints – St. Ann.” 46 Henni wanted to “build a strong German Catholic Community that preserved language and ethnic traditions.” Peter Leo Johnson and William E. Cousins, Crosier on the Frontier: A Life of John Martin Henni, Archbishop of Milwaukee (Library Licensing, LLC, 2012), 13. 47 Jacobi, 56. 48 “History: St. Aloysius.” 154

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in the city’s core, to one of Cincinnati’s newer neighborhoods, Bond Hill, several miles from

downtown.49

In the mid-nineteenth century, Bond Hill was still predominately rural and miles from the

effects of the packed city center, where coal smoke and diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis

spread quickly. The reasons for a move were compelling, as cholera again swept through

Cincinnati’s crowded urban core in 1849-50 taking the lives of more than 6,000 men, women,

and children.50 There were nearly 400 funerals in July alone.51 Although it took nearly a decade

to fundraise and construct the orphanage’s buildings, children were moved to the new asylum in

the fall of 1861.

Fig. 18 - St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, Bond Hill, ca. 1886.52

49 Joseph M. White, “Cincinnati’s German Catholic Life: A Heritage of Lay Participation,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 12:3, German-Catholic Identities in American Culture (Summer, 1994), 113. 50 Matthew D. Smith, “The Specter of Cholera in Nineteenth Century Cincinnati,” Ohio Valley History, 16:2 (Summer 2016), 21-40. 51 Ibid., 23. 52 “St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, Bond Hill, ca. 1886,” Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, http://www.CincinnatiMemoryProject.org. 155

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Unfortunately, the well-meaning, but clearly overwhelmed, lay administrators continued to

experience discipline problems with the expanded orphan population in this larger facility.

Society members were alarmed, for example, by the use of teenaged orphans to care for the

younger children.53 In 1877, orphan society members petitioned Archbishop John Baptist Purcell

for diocesan assistance. His solution was to have nuns from the Sisters of Notre Dame, a small,

German Catholic order that had arrived in the United States in 1874, staff the orphanage. These

women religious took on the care and education of more than two hundred children in residence

at the orphanage shortly after they established their provincial house just across the Ohio River

in Covington, Kentucky.54

The opportunity to care for these children in predominantly German Cincinnati was

providential for both the sisters and the children. The nuns inherited a ready-made community of

German-speaking orphans in the new facility that sat atop a treed hillock in the clean air of Bond

Hill, with sufficient acreage on which to grow fresh vegetables and allow the children access to

sunshine and room to play. They concentrated on the discipline and well-being of the children, spiritual, physical, and intellectual, without having to concern themselves with an extraordinary capital fundraising campaign. The respite from those kind of struggles must have been a welcome one. The sisters had arrived from Germany amidst the Bismarck Kulturkampf campaign that was pro-separation of church and state and antithetical to Catholic doctrine and dogma.

Members of several Catholic religious orders left Germany under the conditions imposed by

Bismarck’s administration during this period.55 Despite all indications that their departure from

Germany was less than auspicious, the sisters apparently bore Bismarck no ill will. In fact, the

53 Ibid. 54 “History: St. Aloysius” 55 “Annals: A Brief Summary of Annals from 1877-1910.” Archives of the Sisters of Notre Dame, Covington, Kentucky (SND-Covington). 156

24:11 only reference to him in the files of either the orphan asylum or the order are found in an entry in the Annals of St. Aloysius Orphanage: “May, 1877 … several wagons with white horses brought the sisters to St. Aloysius Orphanage in Bond Hill … the sisters were taken to the chapel for a solemn high Mass. The preacher told the children that his Excellence Count Bismarck of

Germany had sent the Sisters here to care for them.”56

Like the early administrators of Cincinnati’s GPOH, the fact that the nuns’ primary language was German facilitated both cultural and emotional connections with orphans who came, overwhelmingly, from German-speaking homes. In addition to German language and culture, the nuns were charged with providing the children a well-rounded education. According to the contract signed in 1877 between the Sisters of Notre Dame and the St. Aloysius Orphan

Society, the nuns were to deliver:

instruction for Religion and Bible History, German and English Grammar, Composition, Reading, Nature Study, Arithmetic, Geography, United States History, Singing and Penmanship. The boys should learn Drawing, the girls, Needlework and Domestic Science, so that they will be qualified to fulfil the duties of their future vocations.57

Once children completed their schooling in the eighth grade, they usually remained at St.

Aloysius, often until their eighteenth birthday, and continued to hone domestic and vocational skills working for the orphanage. The children who showed particular academic promise, as well as the appropriate temperament and desire, were selected to attend seminary or convents in preparation for entry into the priesthood or novitiate. In the official Annals, the sisters recounted the paths of these children with an understated pride. Children were also placed, according to the

56 Ibid. 57 “Contract of the St. Aloysius Orphan Society of Cincinnati, Ohio, with the Sisters of Notre Dame of Cleveland, Ohio (Covington, Kentucky) Dated as of Mar. 1, 1877, SND-Covington. 157

24:11 sisters, “in good Catholic homes,” as a safe transition to the working world.58 Frank and Sadie

Herschede, who took in Joseph Moorbrink and twenty-three other orphans, had such a home.

Fig. 19 – “The Orphans of St. Aloysius, ca. 1896.”59

There are several factors that motivated the Herschedes’ outreach to the children of St.

Aloysius. First, Frank’s father died when he was a teenager and he certainly understood the pain of losing a parent. Second, he learned the value of a trade, of arduous work, and of honest dealings through his own apprenticeship that began when he was twelve. Third, and just as important, Frank and Sadie were part of Cincinnati’s devout German Catholic lay community, responsive to the needs of the less fortunate. They took the practical application of the gospel to social needs seriously, even if they did not cloak their efforts in the mantle of what became

Progressive Era reforms.60 As devout Catholics, their efforts also represented their answer to the call of their faith to “do good works” in this world, hoping to ensure a heavenly reward in the next. What follows is a brief biography of the Herschede family, leading up to and including the years where their lives intersected with German Catholic orphans and the nuns who were responsible for the children’s academic, vocational, and spiritual education.

58 “Annals: A Brief Summary of the Annals 1877-1910,” SND-Covington. 59 “The Orphans of St. Aloysius, ca. 1896,” Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, http://www.CincinnatiMemoryProject.org. 60 White, “Cincinnati’s German Catholic Life,” 113-14. 158

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The first Herschede to arrive in Cincinnati was thirty-eight-year old widower Johann

(John) Herschede who left his home in Attendorn, North Rhine-Westphalia, for the United States

in 1851. There is no extant record that gives us an insight into why he undertook the journey. He

might have been motivated by politics, economics, or a broken heart at losing his first wife, but

he came on the heels of the Forty-Eighters during the second wave of German immigration.61

These were the days when ornate steamboats crowded America’s inland waterways from Canada

to the Gulf of Mexico. A skilled finish carpenter, John made his way west to Cincinnati where he

secured employment crafting cabinetry and decorative woodwork for the city’s maturing

shipbuilding industry.62 A year after he arrived, he married twenty-four-year-old Maria (Mary)

Linneman at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in the city’s West End. They raised six children on

Abigail Street where the family remained even after John’s death from apoplexy at the age of

62.63

After his death, Mary and eldest daughter Elisabeth, continued to take in work as

seamstresses. The three youngest children attended school.64 The oldest boys, Frederick, 20, and

Frank, 17, like many young men of the day, were already learning a trade outside the home. Fred

was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker like his father and Frank to a watch mechanic who owned a

repair shop downtown. Frank worked in the repair shop during the day and returned home at

61 G. A. Dobbert, “The Cincinnati Germans, 1870-1920; Disintegration of an Immigrant Community,” The Bulletin of the Cincinnati Historical Society, 3 (Oct. 1965), 229-42; and “Joh. Herschede, Auswanderungen aus der Stadt- und Landgemeine Attendorn nach Amerika,” In Heimatstimmen aus dem Kreise Olpe, 4 Folge (1949), 203, Ancestry.com. 62 From the papers of Joan Roth Herschede (the widow of Mark Herschede, Frank’s grandson), an unprocessed collection, provided to the author by Mrs. Herschede’s daughter, Deborah L. Huffman. 63 Although modern usage of the term “apoplexy” refers to extraordinary anger or emotional distress, in the nineteenth century, it commonly referred to a condition similar to that of a fatal stroke. John Herschede, Cincinnati Birth and Death Records, Hamilton County Genealogical Society, http://www.hcgsohio.org. 64 It was not until 1921 that the State of Ohio mandated by law that children remain in school through the age of 18. Until that time, most children finished their formal education when they completed the eighth grade. 159

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night to study gemology. According to Herschede family records, Frank was ambitious, and he planned to open a full-service jewelry store that offered significant potential for economic security. He saved nearly $3,000 while an apprentice and used the money to open the first

Herschede Jewelers location in downtown’s Emery Arcade in 1877.65 The following September

he married Lisette (Sadie) Ratterman, who had emigrated with her parents and older sister from

Hannover, Germany in 1857. The newlyweds’ first home was close to Frank’s storefront in the

city’s Sixth Ward and to their new parish, Holy Trinity.

The Herschedes eventually found themselves in tight quarters both personally and

professionally. Herschede Jewelers had become a successful enterprise and moved from its

original storefront in the Emery Arcade to a high-profile location on Fourth Street that was closer to the heart of the city’s burgeoning financial and retail district. Frank and Sadie’s growing family (eight of ten children born survived into adulthood) had outgrown their small home in the

Sixth Ward. They left the West End and Holy Trinity parish behind and built a larger home in

Cincinnati’s recently developed Avondale neighborhood.66 They also joined the parish at the

newly consecrated St. Andrew’s on Reading Road, a few doors from their home.

The Herschede children were blessed to be born into a spiritually-centered and financially-secure family. They were a full pendulum swing away from the orphans whose hold

65 Herschede Family Papers. 66 Two and one-half square mile Avondale, northeast of downtown, was incorporated in 1864 by Cincinnati businessmen Daniel Collier, Seth Evans, and Joe C. Moores as an upper-middle class suburban community. Significant home building began in the 1890s and Avondale was annexed by the City of Cincinnati in 1896. The neighborhood has undergone significant change in the nearly one hundred and thirty years since its founding but many of the grand residences contemporary with the Herschede home on Reading Road still stand. For historical information on the Avondale neighborhood, see D. J. Kenny, Kenny’s New Illustrated Guide to Cincinnati: Illustrated Guide to Cincinnati and The World’s Columbian Exposition (Robert E. Clarke Co., 1898), 212-14 and see Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors: Compiled by Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Works Project Administration in the State of Ohio (The Wiesen-Hart Press, 1940), 338-40. 160

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on the economic, if not spiritual, resources was more tenuous. Frank intimately understood the

cost of losing a parent and was empathetic toward children who had been thus deprived. He was

also among the more than 3,000 Catholic businessmen in Cincinnati who were dues-paying members of the Society of St. Aloysius from at least 1893 to 1908.67 The financial support

required for membership in the society was just three dollars annually, certainly not a hardship

for a successful man like Herschede. Had that been his only charitable effort on behalf of the

children of St. Aloysius, his story was unremarkable. Yet, the Herschedes’ commitment to these

children spanned thirty years and involved bringing them into their home, if not into the family

itself.

The Herschedes were Cincinnatians deeply connected to German culture and German

Catholic traditions even though they typically limited their involvement to activities related to

their family, their church, and their business. Frank diversified his business holdings beyond the

jewelry store, when he opened the Herschede Hall Clock Company, specializing in the

manufacture of grandfather clocks. The manufacturing facility was located on Eighth Street, just

down the block from Cincinnati’s City Hall, but the clocks were sold around the country. The

Herschede Hall Clock Company provided a place of employment for several of the orphans

taken in by the Herschedes. The Herschedes’ self-imposed focus on faith, family, and business may have set them apart from many other German immigrants who chose to participate more fully in associations that demonstrated a strong German cultural affinity, but Frank and Sadie

were both faithful Catholics, nonetheless.

67 Society membership number from the “Annals of the St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum: 1912-1913,” SND- Covington. The records of Society membership found in the files of the St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum are incomplete for dates earlier than 1893 and later than 1908. Mss 1098, St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum Records, 1832-1954, Cincinnati Museum Center. 161

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Multiple factors point to the idea that the Herschedes’ religion was the primary moral axis around which their lives revolved, especially their relationships with their parish and St.

Aloysius. In fact, an obituary for Frank Herschede that appeared in a jewelers’ professional association publication confirmed that “in addition to (professional) organizations, Herschede was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Men’s Club, and the Knights of

Columbus” a Catholic men’s service organization.68 This bolsters the assertion that the

Herschedes eschewed membership in many of the German cultural organizations available in the city and confined their involvement to a select few. Like his father before him, Frank was a man of faith, family, and work. Those priorities left little time for German singing societies or the

Turnverein.

The Herschedes were not progressive social reformers. Their outreach to the children of

St. Aloysius reflected an individual commitment to impact lives through direct action rather than through participation in a larger social movement. In this way, they managed to balance their adherence to Catholic dogma with the American ideals of personal action and responsibility. The

Herschedes were self-made members of Cincinnati’s upper-middle class but they were also exemplars of those who answered the church’s call for good works. We have the Herschedes’ actions to speak for their intentions in the absence of a personal written record of their efforts on behalf of these orphans. They demonstrated their commitment to their faith’s expectations of charitable actions by taking these twenty-four children from St. Aloysius into the family home and business over a thirty-year period. On average, this meant that a new child was brought within the Herschedes’ sphere of influence every twelve to fifteen months. These children, products of both the Catholic education system disseminated by the Sisters of Notre Dame and

68 “Death of Frank Herschede: Impressive Services at Funeral of Cincinnati’s Well Known Jeweler and Clock Manufacturer,” The Jeweler’s Circular, Sep. 27, 1922, 75. 162

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the institution’s child-care practices that were steeped in the Catholic faith, came to the

Herschedes educated and prepared to work. In return, the opportunity offered by the Herschedes

represented a safe transition from the insulated environment of the orphanage to the larger world

in which these young people were about to find themselves.

Many sectors of the American population embraced the notion of the righteous aspect of

reform during the Progressive Era. Federal and state bureaucrats warmed to the ideas of those

who planted the seeds of this upwelling of social welfare that was nurtured by ministers of the

Social Gospel. Despite the benefits many found with involvement in the Social Gospel

movement, the Herschedes operated in more traditional terrain, contained within the metes and

bounds of their faith. They chose to instigate and nurture regular contact with those at the

vanguard of one avenue of child welfare efforts in Cincinnati: the nuns charged with providing

food, shelter, clothing, education, and moral instruction to German Catholic orphans. The

Herschedes’ role was not that of a local facilitator of a grand plan to rescue thousands of children

from institutional care by outplacing them through the orphan train system. Their goal was much

more modest. It was focused through their efforts to mentor these young people in a transitional

setting that connected the orphanage to the world at large through daily contact with a traditional

Catholic family in a safe setting.

The Herschedes were, according to parish and family accounts, devout practicing

Catholics and that fidelity informed their worldview. They occupied, in their relationship with

the orphans of St. Aloysius, a segment of that arc of the historical relationship between the

Catholic faith and the care of abandoned and orphaned children. In fact, their efforts bridged the

two paths of society’s treatment of orphans: aliena misericordia, and the idea that orphan homes were a saving grace for “‘friendless orphans’ or other children who literally had no place else to

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go.”69 Moreover, the development of the German Waisenhaus movement that promoted

institutionalized orphan care, helped to inform the cultural attitudes that German Catholic

immigrants, including Frank’s and Sadie’s own parents, brought with them to the United

States.70 They did not equate an institutional setting for these children with the danger of

allowing these children to remain on the streets.

When the Herschede family moved into the seven-bedroom home designed for them by

renowned architect Samuel Smith Godley in Avondale, the household included Frank, Sadie,

their eight children, and sixteen-year old Frank B., a St. Aloysius orphan who had been released to the Herschedes in May of 1908, one of twenty-four the Herschedes took in between 1894 and

1926.71 Like the others, he had already spent nearly half of his childhood in the orphanage. Frank

B. was born in 1892, and according to the orphanage’s intake records, his mother died from

diphtheria in 1894 and his father remarried not long after.72 Unfortunately, his father contracted

spinal meningitis and died in 1897. His stepmother retained custody of him for four years after

his father’s death, but sent him to St. Aloysius in September of 1901. The records are silent as to

why she was unable to care for him any longer, perhaps she remarried or became ill herself, and

he remained there for the next seven years in the care of the sisters.

From a broad perspective, there are any number of data points shared among the children

admitted to St. Aloysius. Ultimately, they were all vulnerable children, and ought not be reduced

69 Joel F. Harrington, The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Delinquents in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 155. 70 Foundling hospitals were founded in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire during the Early Modern Era, as were orphanages run by the Church or local civil authorities. The Modern Era’s Waisenhaus (orphanage) movement in Germany that promoted the idea of caring for children in centralized institutional settings paralleled the development of orphanages in colonial America. Jacobi, “Between Charity and Education,” 51-66. 71 “Frank B.,” Mss 1098, Records of the St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, Box 30, Folder 2, Cincinnati Museum Center. 72 Ibid. 164

24:11 to mere statistical data collected from record books. But the stories of how they arrived on the doorstep of St. Aloysius often mirrored larger social issues and can help us assess recurring fact patterns and the intersection of orphaned children and social ills of the period. That is certainly true for the Herschede orphans.73

Table 274 The Children Released to Frank and Sadie Herschede from St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum 1894-1924

Admit Name/Religion DOB Sibs Mother From Living Father From Living Dismiss Age Date Date

7/6/86 Magdalena G. 2/23/79 0 ? ? ? ? ? ? 5/3/94 15 RC 10/18/88 Ida L. RC 5/7/83 2 Maria Anna GER No Bernard GER Yes 5/3/98 15 F. d. 1886 UNK Unknown COD 4/1/87 Edward W. RC 7/19/92 2 Helen S. US/ Yes Anthony GER No 4/10/03 16 GER UNK d. 1887 TB 1/31/91 Bernard S. RC 4/7/89 1 Catherine M. US/ No George US Yes 5/7/06 17 d. 1891 GER Fever GER Desertion 9/24/01 Frank B. RC 5/28/92 0 Martha C. d. US/ No William US/ No 5/29/08 16 1894 GER/ Diabetes d. 1897 GER Spinal IRE Meningitis 1/4/93 Maria Francis 5/29/86 3 Maria H. d. US/ No Henry GER No 3/30/03 16 R. RC 1890 GER TB d. 1893 Unknown 10-14-90 Clara W. RC 6/14/86 2 Bernardine US/ No William US/ No 10/30/01 15 v. H. d. 1890 GER Consumption d. 1886 GER Apoplexy

7-9-07 August B. RC 7/8/95 2 Anna US/ No Herman GER No 11/27/11 16 W. d.1906 GER Consumption d. 1907 Unknown 12/10/09 John P. RC 11/23/0 2 Elizabeth M. US/ No Frank US No n.d. 2 d. 1909 GER Lung d. 1909 Suicide infection 11/21/12 Joseph M. RC 4/12/04 3 Cecilia H. d. GER No August GER No 4/3/20 16 1909 Illness d. 1912 Accident? --/--/07 Anna/Annie R. 6/16/02 0 Bara C. HUN Yes Jura HUN No n.d. RC d. 1904 Accident

9/30/09 Anna B. RC 12/27/0 2-3 Elizabeth W. US/ No Albert US/ Yes n.d. 4 d.1909 GER Child- GER Desertion Birth 1/13/10 Joseph O. RC 3/19/05 3 Susanna K. US/ No John GER Yes n.d. d. 1909 GER Child-Birth Desertion

4/12/98 Walter M. RC 6/__/91 2 Maria H. d. US/ No NFN M. US Yes 5/6/07 15 1898 GER Unknown Desertion 7/21/00 Clara P. RC 6/28/92 0 Elizabeth S. US/ No George US/ Yes 5/14/n.d. d. 1900 GER TB GER Desertion

73 Only one orphan, a boy, who was dismissed to the Herschedes on Sep. 10, 1907, returned to the orphanage (Nov. 3, 1907). The file contains no commentary on the reason that the placement did not work out. Mss 1098, Records of St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, Box 30, Folder 2, Cincinnati Museum Center. 74 This “score card” may seem a heartless way to introduce the children who were eventually dismissed to the Herschedes, yet it still provides an interesting snapshot of the children as a group. The order in which the names appear in the chart reflects the order in which they were listed on dismissal reports in the files of the orphanage. Mss 1098, Records of St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, Box 1, File 1, Items 2-4, 6, 8, 10- 15 and Box 7, Files 1-4, Cincinnati Museum Center.

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4/8/13 Alfred D. RC 4/8/99 3 Ella R. d. US No Henry US/ No 5/15/16 17 1913 Consumption d. 1909 GER Consumption 10/17/05 Corrine R. RC/J 6/__/00 2 Josephine P. US/ No David GER Yes 5/14/16 15 d. 1905 GER Suicide Desertion 7/14/08 Carl F. RC 10/6/99 5 Wilhelmina US/ Unknown Peter US/ Unknown 4/19/n.d. M. GER GER

7/29/10 Rose/a S. RC 7/8/00 5 Mary US/ Yes Martin GER Living 4/26/n.d. Catherine M. GER Long-view Hospital 7/10/97 William J. 10/5/92 2 Emma W. d. US/ No John US Living in 9/10/07* 15 1897 GER Lung Louisville returned bleeding to St. Al’s 11/3/07 4/8/16 Margaret J. RC 6/29/06 0 Anna F. GER Yes Frank US/ Yes at time 4/11/23 17 Longview d. 1918 GER of admission Hospital Died of influenza 1918

11/22/13 Helen H. RC 8/12/02 2 Otilla W. d. US/ No George US/ Living 4/30/19 17 1913 GER TB H. GER Desertion 11/22/13 George H. RC 1/7/11 2 Otilla W. d. US/ No George US/ Living 6/4/26 15 1913 GER TB H. GER Desertion 9/1/13 George S. RC 2/1/07 ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 4/11/23 16 1/23/08 Florence U. 2/27/06 6 Loretta H. US/ No Frank US/ Living 4/__/23 15 L/RC d. 1908 GER Pneumonia GER Could not care for children 6/15/10 Margaret O. 5/19/07 1 Margaret M. US/ No Christian GER Living 4/30/24 17 RC/P d. 1907 GER Typhoid Does not want children

There were twelve girls and twelve boys between the ages of fifteen and seventeen dismissed

from St. Aloysius to the Herschedes between 1894 and 1926. The overwhelming majority of

them were either first- or second-generation German Americans.75 Nearly ninety-four percent of

the parents were Roman Catholic and their children had records to prove that they had received

the sacrament of baptism.76 Most of the children were born in the Cincinnati area. Their families

were parishioners at either: St. Clement in St. Bernard, St. Aloysius in Bridgetown, St. Paul and

St. Stanislaus in Over-the-Rhine, Blessed Sacrament and St. Charles Borromeo in Cincinnati

proper, St. Aloysius in Bond Hill, St. Boniface in Northside, St. John in Silverton, Sts. Peter and

75 The only exceptions were a young girl who was Hungarian by birth, and Frank Barlion whose mother was of Irish and German descent. Mss 1098, Records of St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, Box 30, Folder 2, Cincinnati Museum Center. 76 Three girls had one non-Catholic parent. Mss 1098, St. Aloysius, Box 30, Folders 1 and 2, CMC. 166

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Paul in Reading, or Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Sedamsville.77 Three-quarters of the children

who were placed with the Herschedes entered St. Aloysius with siblings, as few as one and as

many as six.78 These children were as young as two and as old as thirteen when they were

admitted, although most them were between five and ten years of age.

All of the children were born to married parents. At the time of the children’s admission,

however, all but six of the mothers had died: two in childbirth, one from diphtheria, two from

suicide, and the rest from assorted illnesses, usually tuberculosis (referred to in orphanage

records as consumption). Two of the mothers who were still living had been committed to the state’s Longview Hospital for Treatment of the Insane, located in Carthage, north of downtown.

The four remaining women formally declared that they were unable, or unwilling, to care for their children. By comparison, nine fathers had died: two in accidents, one was a confirmed suicide, one from spinal meningitis, two from tuberculosis, one from apoplexy, and two from unknown causes. According to the admissions records, the whereabouts of two other fathers were unknown, and the rest had either deserted the family or publicly declared that they were unable, or unwilling, to care for their children, sometimes before the death of the mother, but not always.

The records are unclear how long young Frank B. remained in the Herschede home. By

1910, however, he was listed in United States Census records as living in a boarding house in the

3400 block of Reading Road, across the road from St. Andrew’s and just down the street from

77 Only one native-born child, a boy, was born outside of Cincinnati. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky and baptized at the Louisville Cathedral. Mss 1098, Records of St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, Box 30, Folder 1, Cincinnati Museum Center. 78 The Herschedes took in one set of siblings, although seven years apart, the girl in 1919 and her brother in 1926. Mss 1098, Records of St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, Box 30, Folder 2, Cincinnati Museum Center. 167

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the Herschedes.79 At the age of seventeen, his occupation was listed as “chauffeur.”80 Although

his employer’s name is not provided in the census records, he was likely still on the Herschedes’

payroll. In May of 1910, the Herschedes took in another St. Aloysius orphan. This time it was a

young girl named Clara P. Clara was seven when she was admitted to St. Aloysius in 1900. Her mother had just died of tuberculosis, but her father had deserted the family prior to her mother’s death.81 Clara was listed as a “domestic servant” for the Herschedes in the 1910 United States

Census, living in the Herschede home. By the 1920 census, she was a homemaker in her own

right.82 In fact, Frank B. and Clara P. were married in 1918 after Frank returned from serving in

the U.S. Army during World War I. His move to the boarding house in 1910 likely served to

create a prudent distance for them to court within the rules of the Herschede home. Frank and

Clara B. raised their four children in Cincinnati after they married. Clara died in 1970 and Frank

in 1979 after more than fifty years of marriage.

The war years were a challenging time for Americans of German heritage as anti-German

sentiment permeated the public psyche and animated social anxiety to action. There were widely

held fears that German Americans had conflicted loyalties because of the war.83 Cincinnati, with

its concentration of citizens of German ancestry, was certainly not immune to the paranoia. Local

politicians targeted many German institutions during this time and streets had proudly borne

79 Record for “Frank B.” 1910 US Federal Census. 80 Ibid. 81 “Clara P.,” Records of St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, Mss 1098, Records of St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, Box 30, Folder 2, Cincinnati Museum Center. 82 Record for “Clara Popp” 1910 US Federal Census, Ancestry.com, http://interactive.ancestry.com/7884/44919200270?pid+21780546; Record for “Clara Popp” 1920 US Federal Census, Ancestry.com, http://interactive.ancestry.com/6061/4384909_00167/33733983? backurl=http://person.ancestry.com/tree/7279564/person/24053552478/facts. 83 Scott A. Merriman, “Persecution of the German Language in Cincinnati and the Ake Law in Ohio, 1917-1919,” Journal of the Association for History and Computing, 1:2 (Nov. 1998), http://hdi.handle.net/2027/spo.ee10410.0001.202. 168

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German surnames were renamed, almost overnight.84 At the direction of Cincinnati’s archbishop, the Sisters of Notre Dame, and presumably other men and women religious, were compelled to take an “oath of allegiance” to the United States in June of 1918.85

Even successful businessmen were not immune to anti-German antipathy. As the

Cincinnati Enquirer reported in the spring of 1917, Frank Herschede was shocked to be caught up in the panic:

Frank Herschede, President of the Frank Herschede Company, upon his return from a two weeks’ visit in New York, was dumfounded (sic) yesterday by the knowledge that his name has been associated with certain alleged acts of disloyalty to the Government of the United States. Mr. Herschede, who was born in Cincinnati and has lived here all his life, was as startled and chagrined and went immediately to the Federal authorities with a request that an official probe be made into the sources of the rumors.86

Government officials informed Frank that they had already investigated him and determined the rumors were unfounded. Relieved to be vindicated, Frank offered his manufacturing facilities, including the Herschede Hall Clock Company factory, for “any use to which the United States can put them.”87 The government immediately took Frank up on the offer. As the Cincinnati

Enquirer reported: “in time of war there is a great necessity for timing devices, used in connection with mines, bombs, torpedoes and other implements of war” and the Herschedes committed to making these products until hostilities ceased.88 Unfortunately, enmity overseas continued to stoke the anti-German backlash at home.

84 “VERSENKT!: Hun Names Torpedoed: By Connell Committee When Rechristening Streets: Twelve of German Origin Are Hit in New Ordinance: Rap Taken at Herbert S. Bigelow in Change – In ‘Woodrow,’ President is Honored,” Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), Tue., April 9, 1918, 11. 85 “Annals: 1918-1919.” SND-Covington. 86 “Herschede: Is Given a Clean Bill: By Federal Officials, Who Investigated Rumors About Him--Offers Self and Family To Aid Country.” Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), Tue., April 3, 1917, 16. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 169

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State politicians joined in on the hyperbole and histrionics of local officials. Ohio Gov.

James M. Cox created programs such as the “Americanization Committee” to enforce pro-

American and pro-assimilation activities including “the teaching of the English language to

immigrants who wanted to become United States citizens.”89 This committee also broadly

interpreted its mandate to include the censorship of library books and “recommended removing

‘pro-German’ books from libraries during the war.”90 In addition, Cox also signed the Ake Law

prohibiting German language instruction to all students in kindergarten through the eighth grade.

These changes signaled an abrupt end to the impetus to care exclusively for German-speaking children at St. Aloysius. It meant that the children might be cared for in any number of Catholic institutions, including the English-speaking St. Joseph’s Orphan Home. It also meant that St.

Aloysius might take in any Catholic child in need of a home. Despite these developments, the

Herschede family continued to take children from St. Aloysius into their home until 1926, four years after Frank’s death.

In the case of the Herschedes then, rather than secular industrial interests at work, there were entirely different motivations at play. Frank Herschede’s business interests were incidental to the story. His link to the orphanage was rooted in an utterly pre-industrial concern: the tradition of Catholic lay piety. In fact, the Herschedes’ story illustrates one of the ways in which traditional religious approaches to the care of orphans among immigrant American communities existed in the years leading up to reforms of the Progressive Era. The Herschedes were unique, not only for their path of first-person involvement, but also for the duration of their interaction.

Perhaps the fact that German Catholics were part of a larger German immigrant community in

Cincinnati, that also included significant numbers of German Jews and German Protestants,

89 Merriman, n.p. 90 Ibid., n.p. 170

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made for a relative equilibrium of experiences during the war. The fact that the city was

relatively ethnically homogenous during this period meant that religiously-based tensions were

somewhat mitigated. That was not the case in Cleveland. While Cincinnati’s Catholic churches

were established in locations in which the population density warranted, Cleveland’s parishes

depended not only on numbers, but on the ethnic variety, and ethnic strength, of its

neighborhoods.

Cleveland

Catholic and Protestant relations in Cleveland remained strained into the late nineteenth

century. The street corner brawls of the mid-century were replaced by knuckle-bruisers in the sectarian press. Between 1877 and 1890, two local papers, each with a distinct religious

readership base, battled for supremacy in the court of public opinion. The editor of the city’s

Protestant, pro-abolition, and anti-Catholic, Cleveland Leader was Edwin Cowles. He viewed his

anti-Catholic editorials as an antidote to growing Catholic influence in municipal matters, but his

anti-Catholic provocations did not go unanswered. They were met with an equally potent defense

of the Roman Catholic church in America by the editor of Cleveland’s diocesan paper, the

Catholic Universe.

Bishop Gilmour hired Manly Tello, the editor of a Minnesota Catholic weekly, as editor

of the Catholic Universe in 1877. Tello took on the role of Catholic champion in a point-

counterpoint with Cowles. They engaged in volleys of vituperative editorials that underscored

the chasm that existed between their contradictory portrayals of the power of the Roman Catholic

church and its impact on the city. Tello gladly donned the mantle of defender of the faith, but not

all of his editorials had the support of the bishop. A former captain in the Army of the

Confederacy, Tello had been captured on the battlefield and sentenced to a federal prison camp,

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from which he escaped and fled to Canada for the war’s duration. Editorials that were not

directed toward defense of the church revealed his lingering bitterness over the South’s loss of

the war. These columns exposed him to a level of scrutiny he had not anticipated. His overtly

political provocations drew the bishop’s ire and he ordered Tello to tamp down the rhetoric or

jeopardize his employment. Tello acquiesced, but resented being muzzled on this intensely

personal, and emotional, issue.91 The sectarian bickering between Cowles and Tello continued

unabated until the death of the former in 1890. Without an adversary, Tello gave up the editorial

reins of the Catholic Universe in 1892.

The Catholic child-saving efforts in Cleveland were spread among a more ethnically

diverse population than the one found among Cincinnati’s heavily German demographic. The

Diocese of Cleveland opened several orphanages in the city in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries: the St. Vincent de Paul Orphanage, the St. Mary’s Orphan Asylum for Girls, the St.

Ann’s Infant Asylum and Maternity Home, the St. Anthony’s Home for Working Boys, and the

Holy Ghost Orphanage, but did not provide regular operating funds for all of them.92 St. Mary’s

Orphan Asylum for Girls was founded by Bishop Rappe, for girls age four to sixteen, in 1851.

The home was staffed by the Daughters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary religious order. For the

first twelve years, the asylum cared for the girls within the Cleveland city limits but in 1863, the

younger girls (ages four to nine) were moved to a facility in a rural area of the county, named St.

Joseph’s Orphanage for Girls. St. Joseph’s was also staffed by the Daughters of the Immaculate

Heart of Mary and by the early 1900s, more than 250 girls were in residence. In 1923, the

Welfare Federation of Cleveland began providing funding for St. Joseph’s but as the need for

91 “Tello, Manly,” Cleveland Biography, 444. 92 The Diocese also operated St. Louis Orphanage in Louisville, Ohio, northwest of Canton. The facility was combined with other diocesan facilities at Parmadale in 1925. 172

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orphanage space diminished, the facility was no longer cost efficient. The girls were then

transferred to a smaller facility purchased by the diocese that had been the site of a nineteenth

century sanitarium. St. Joseph’s operated as St. Joseph’s-on-the-Lake until 1947 when the girls were transferred to the combined diocesan facility at Parmadale. In the meantime, St. Mary’s became St. Mary’s Female Asylum and received operating funds only from donations and a share of the proceeds of the city’s annual orphan fair. In 1894, all of the girls were moved to St.

Joseph’s and St. Mary’s became a boarding house for young Catholic women.

St. Vincent de Paul Orphanage was founded in 1852, also by Rappe. It took in boys

between the ages of four and fourteen. The home was staffed by the Sisters of Charity of St.

Augustine, sent from the order’s provincial house in Cincinnati. The orphanage was funded

entirely by donations and by orphan fair proceeds. It housed up to one hundred boys at a time

and closed in 1925 when the boys were moved to Parmadale. St. Ann’s Infant Asylum and

Maternity Home was established in 1873 by the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine to care for the

infants of unwed mothers. According to Marian J. Morton, the diocese opened the maternity

home to “protect young Catholic women from the vigorous proselytizing of the Retreat.” 93 The

Retreat was a Protestant home for unwed mothers operated by the forerunner of the Young

Women’s Christian Association. The Retreat was protectively Protestant in its practices and

ideology, and caused an uproar when it allegedly turned away a Catholic priest who was “trying

to reach the bedside of a dying Catholic girl” who had requested last rites.94

St. Anthony’s Home for Working Boys was founded by the diocese in 1906 under the

direction of Bishop Horstmann. Throughout its operation, St. Anthony’s provided a home for

93 Marian J. Morton, “Fallen Women, Federated Charities, and Maternity Homes, 1913-1973,” Social Service Review, 62:1 (Mar. 1988), 63. 94 Michael J. Hynes, History of the Diocese of Cleveland: Origin and Growth (World, 1950), 168 quoted in Morton, “Fallen Women, Federated Charities, and Maternity Homes,” 63, n. 8. 173

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boys aged twelve to eighteen who were employed in the city. It merged with Parmadale in 1975.

Finally, Holy Ghost Orphanage was opened at the behest of the Polish community in 1921. From

its opening, the orphanage was beset by alleged mismanagement at the hands of its resident

priest. 95 The diocese closed the facility in 1925 and moved the children then in residence at

Holy Ghost to Parmadale.

Fundraising efforts to support these and other Catholic charitable institutions came from

modern orphan fairs and from historical religious roots—including nuns publicly begging for

alms—but Bishop Horstmann was mortified by the overt efforts tied to the latter. In a 1901 letter

to the Mother Superior of St. Vincent’s Orphanage he wrote:

Respected Sister:

Repeated complaints have reached me that on pay days various sisterhoods in this city have had representations at the same hour and place, for the purpose of soliciting alms from persons then receiving their pay whether at railroads or elsewhere.

I am also informed that this has been especially the case at the City Hall, when city employes (sic) are paid … at which time there has been unseemly rivalry between the sisterhoods, asking for alms in behalf of their respective charities; and that this has also caused much unfavorable comments among Catholic city employes (sic), as well, and more so, among Protestants. In order to put a stop to this rivalry I have thought it well to … arrange for a time for each collecting place, when each of the sisterhoods may take up a collection, undisturbed by other collectors.96

If Horstmann was distraught at the thought of nuns begging for money from Catholic workers,

like pigeons incessantly cooing at the bread man, his tone was one of barely restrained apoplexy

at the thought of them begging from Protestants. Such actions played into many of the negative

95 “Holy Ghost Orphanage,” Schrembs – Institutions – Holy Ghost Orphanage, Archives of the Diocese of Cleveland (ADC). 96 “Letter from Bishop I. F. Horstmann to the Superioress of St. Vincent’s” Dated Feb. 4, 1901. Ignatius Horstmann Papers (II): Institutions: General: Orphan Collections, ADC. 174

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stereotypes that Protestants held against Catholics, and the church. Not long after the meeting,

Horstmann produced the following schedule of permissible collection times and places:

Fig. 20 – “Schedule of Months, and List of Places, Assigned for Collections, to Each of the Charitable Institutions of Cleveland.”97

The sisterhoods were thus constrained so that employees across the city were not beset by

swarms of persistent nuns collecting for numerous organizations, regardless of the inherent worthiness of the cause.

Orphanages of the time consistently operated in various states of overcrowding and disrepair and children sometimes suffered for the want of a steady supply of food and clothing.

Even diocesan-run orphanages were not immune from shortfalls of money and supplies. The

Cleveland Diocese did not find a steady financial footing for its charitable work until Bishop

John Farrelly and his protégé, Father Charles H. LeBlond, opened a Cleveland office of the

97 “Schedule of Months, and List of Places, Assigned for Collections, to Each of the Charitable Institutions of Cleveland,” Ignatius Horstmann Papers (II): Institutions: General: Orphan Collections, ADC. 175

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national Catholic Charities organization in 1912.98 Modest gains were made with fundraising

efforts that first year when the Cleveland office reached about twenty-eight percent of its initial

$60,000 goal.99 The financial picture improved significantly between 1913 and 1916 when the

city’s charitable organizations came together under the umbrella of the Welfare Federation of

Cleveland, which in turn created the Community Chest organization that provided reliable

baseline funding for charitable institutions going forward.100 In late 1918, LeBlond shared a

serendipitous train ride with Cleveland businessman Herman J. Trenkamp who advised the

young priest to professionalize Catholic-specific fundraising further through outreach to successful Catholic businessmen.101 LeBlond took that advice and in 1919, the Cleveland

Catholic Charities Corporation was founded. The principal achievement of the organization was to oversee the 1925 consolidation of diocesan-run orphanages and infant asylums at Parmadale.

Economies of scale and consolidation of effort benefitted the diocese and its young wards.

In the early twentieth century, the focus of interparish church discord had undergone a metamorphosis of necessity. Catholic parishes began to battle one another to secure the approbation of the diocese for the right to expand the geographic size of the territory that their parishes served. The transformation of this campaign for dominance from one of nationality parishes to one of territorial parishes shifted in concert with the passage of the Johnson-Reed

Act, signed into law by President Herbert Hoover in 1924.102 As immigration slowed to a trickle,

parishes moved to increase their influence within the diocese through an accretion of territory

98 Father LeBlond was a member of the first class of seminarians ordained by Bishop Farrelly. His principal responsibilities were as an assistant priest at St. John the Evangelist, the diocesan cathedral. Rory O’Connor, The Voice of the World (The Catholic Charities Corporation of Cleveland, 1996), 3. 99 Ibid. 100 Community Chest was the forerunner of today’s United Way, a coalition of charitable organizations that administer charitable collection in hundreds of cities around the United States. 101 O’Connor, 4-6. 102 8 U.S.C. Chapter 6. 176

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where American-born children of prior generations of immigrants were counted on to dominate

the parish rolls, rather than increasing parish populations through the addition of newly arrived immigrant parishioners. Throughout this period, the growing Catholic community continued to respond to the needs of its members who had fallen on tough times because of illness, job loss, generational poverty, and parental abandonment. Its holistic response to vulnerable children was broad, ranging even farther than those efforts that operated with sponsorship of the diocese.

In 1878, Sister Mary Cecelia, who later became mother general of the Sisters of Notre

Dame’s provincial house in Cleveland, accompanied Mother General M. Chrysostom to greet a visitor to the house in Woodland Hills. The man who wished to speak to Mother Chrysostom explained that:

He had once been a rich man, but on account of deplorable domestic circumstances was brought down to narrow straits. His wife did not understand how to make the house a real home for her husband. He was editor of a newspaper. When he returned home from work, tired and hungry, there was no meal ready, but she was playing the piano instead of tending to her duties … He did not come home for his meals, but went to a restaurant; the next thing was he started to drink. From bad it went to worse, and now he was facing the loss of his property … He had come to ask the sisters to take his children, but under these circumstances Mother Mary Chrysostom though it not advisable to do so. After the man had left she said: ‘Sister M. Cecilia, for such children we must build a house.” This was the instigation to the Mt. St. Mary’s Institute ‘of today.’103

There is significant, and convincing anecdotal evidence that this hard-luck man was, in fact,

Manly Tello, the editor of the Catholic Universe. While an escaped federal prisoner living in

Canada during the U.S. Civil War, Tello met, and later married, seventeen-year old Annie

“Rowena” Scales.104 Rowena was born in Louisville, Kentucky where her father was the owner

of a successful tobacco operation. Scales moved his family to Canada prior to the

103 “Annals of the Sisters of Notre Dame: 1884-1904,” Annals, 1, SND-Chardon. 104 Rowena Scales was born in Kentucky but emigrated to Canada with her family who were Confederate sympathizers and relocated their substantial tobacconist business holdings to Toronto at the war’s outset. 177

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commencement of the war, fearing reprisals against his business concerns for his pro-Southern

sympathies. The Scales family was well-to-do and a piano was listed among the numerous assets in Joab Scales’ will.105 Certainly, Rowena was taught to play the piano as a child. In 1878, the

five Tello children were likely under the age of twelve and in need of a mothering influence,

especially if their own mother was emotionally unstable and unavailable. Considering the divide

between Catholics and Protestants, evidenced in Tello’s own editorials, it was likely a Catholic

who approached the nuns, and there was only one Catholic newspaper editor in Cleveland in

1878. Rowena was institutionalized for most of the last decade of her life at the Northern Ohio

Lunatic Asylum in Newburgh where she died in 1889 of paresis, also known as paralytic

dementia.106

The Sisters of Notre Dame of Chardon is a provincial house of the larger Sisters of Notre

Dame order. It is a sister community to the provincial house of the order in Covington, Kentucky whose nuns operated Cincinnati’s St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum discussed earlier in this chapter.

When the original group of eight sisters immigrated to the United States in 1874, half of them

went on to Covington and eventually took over the administration of St. Aloysius. Co-founder of

the order, Sister Mary Aloysia Wolbring and the remaining sisters established a mission in

Cleveland. By 1878, the Cleveland congregation of SND had grown to more than two hundred

105 “Will and Two Codicils of Joab Scales, filed Jan. 14, 1896,” cited in Jane E. MacNamara, “Where the Story Takes Me . . .” www.wheretheystorytakesme.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Joab-Scales-estate- file-150dpi.pdf. 106 Tello’s marriage to Rowena caused a rift between their families. Manly’s grandfather was upset because Rowena was not Catholic when they married (even though she later converted and the two were officially married in the Church after her conversion). M. Smith “Memorial Page for Pedro Cornelius Manly Tello (25 Feb. 1842-4 Apr. 1905), cited in “Manly Tello, Confederate Captain & Catholic Editor” dated 01/Set/2008, tyyps://geneall.net/pt/forum/150767/manly-tello-confederate-captain-catholic- editor/#9206960. In addition, in a codicil to his will, Rowena’s father Joab, excluded any of Rowena and Manly’s children from their inheritance if they became a “nun or shall enter any religious order of the Roman Catholic Church.” “Will and Two Codicils of Joab Scales, filed Jan. 14, 1896,” cited in Jane E. MacNamara, “Where the Story Takes Me . . .” www.wheretheystorytakesme.ca/wp- content/uploads/2013/09/Joab-Scales-estate-file-150dpi.pdf. 178

24:11 sisters. Their first provincial house in Cleveland was located at 18th Street and Superior Avenue where their mission, as in Cincinnati, was to care for orphans and to “teach the children of immigrants.”107 The Mount St. Mary Institute (MSMI) has been routinely omitted from earlier scholarship of Cleveland’s orphanages. The use of “Institute” in its name led previous historians to believe it was a boarding school rather than an orphanage, but according to Sister M. Margaret

Wood, archivist at SND-Chardon, MSMI was intended from the beginning as a home for orphaned and half-orphaned girls.108

The sisters relied on “divine Providence” for the financial means to build the Institute as their solicitation for funds from the public proved to be fruitless: “Sister M. Hildegardis and

Sister M. Forrerria were appointed. We went—but the results—not one red penny.”109

Regardless of these disappointing early efforts, the facility in Cleveland’s Woodland Hills neighborhood on Buckeye Road finally opened to girls of five to fifteen years of age in 1884, six years after their fateful meeting with Manly Tello, built with funds provided by the order’s motherhouse.110 MSMI made an immediate and positive impact on the community at large. In

1885, the Cleveland Plain Dealer featured the sisters and the institute in an article that informed readers:

The largest Catholic religious community of sisters in the diocese of Cleveland is that of the Sisters of Notre Dame … An unusual interest is centered about this order from the fact that they are exiles from Prussia, their native land, being driven hence by Bismarck in his onslaught upon Catholic institutions in that country commenced fourteen years ago … subsequently a decree of confiscation of property was issued and upon short notice the sisters were compelled to

107 “Our History: Sisters of Notre Dame Arrive in USA,” Sisters of Notre Dame, Chardon Province, SNDChardon.org, https://sndchardon.org/about-us/our-history/. 108 Author’s interview with Sister M. Margaret Wood, archivist, SND-Chardon, Sep. 27, 2017. 109 The order’s motherhouse would continue to advance monies to the institute but the orphanage was always responsible for repayment of those advances. Annals, 1, SND-Chardon. 110 Around 1910, the sisters began to take in girls under the age of five. A former parlor was turned into the “babies room.” Ibid., 13. 179

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abandon their convent and branch houses, so that … every sister of Notre Dame had been exiled from Prussian territory.111

These nuns in exile had charge of the nearly forty young girls in residence at MSMI during its first full year of operation. In the words of the Plain Dealer, the girls’ daily existence was idyllic:

Out in the grove were the very voices of thirtyseven (sic) orphan and half orphan girls who call this their home. Pastures green and rich fields of clover skirt the wood towards the smoky city, with its spires and tall chimney tops, while away toward the setting sun spread the glassy blue waters of Lake Erie … but oh! at the convent’s rear, on long lines were stretched out to dry rigid skirts of home dyed material, of dark blue, and other long lines of German [bedticks], and here were the sturdy sisters of toil of the institution, in stout wooden shoes, industriously clubbing those strong ticks, sending every particle of dust heavenward.112

Childhood at MSMI was portrayed as pastoral perfection, and the sisters were recognized for

their exhaustive efforts in working toward fulfillment of their own missions, both temporal and

spiritual.

Einmal sin in Gott allein, Der da lebt, der da schebt, In Himmel und auf Erden113

Like the children of St. Aloysius who were cared for and educated by the Sisters of Notre

Dame in Cincinnati, the girls of MSMI were instructed in German and in English. The prayer

above is just one of several prayer exercises spoken by the children at the beginning of each

school day. There were no contracts signed between the sisters in Cleveland and an orphan

111 “BISMARCK’S EXILES: Sisters of Notre Dame—Their Academy and Convent in This City: A Company of Nuns Who Were Driven from Prussia Now Located Here,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), Jun. 5, 1885, 1-2, Mount St. Mary Institute Records: Newspaper Clippings, reprinted in the files of SND-Chardon. 112 Ibid., 3. 113 “There is only one God, He lives and reigns, In Heaven and on Earth.” In “Mount St. Mary’s Institute Records: MEMORIES of Sister Mary Jane Berg,” 3, Archives SND-Chardon. 180

24:11 society that provided minimal oversight of the facility as was the case in Cincinnati, but each girl:

would possess a copy book for daily Dictation Exercises in English and German. Each would have a slate, especially for computations in arithmetic … The slate pencils were sharpened on the stone steps of the school. Dictation exercises were bilingual. Primary children were taught the German script. They could master when to use “longes” (long) s and “rundes” … (round) s. Children learned both German and English songs, especially if their teacher was also a musician. Daily German Reading Lesson was mandatory. Even when young American sisters taught in German parishes, the children were expected to receive their daily, or weekly, German reading lesson.114

Unlike the Annals of St. Aloysius, there is no indication in the Annals of MSMI, that the orphans ever stopped receiving bilingual instruction with the passage of the Ake Law.

Like other women religious, the Sisters of Notre Dame cared more for their mission and the children then they did about their own health. Co-founder of the order, Sister M. Aloysia, died in September of 1889, when she was just sixty years old: “Her happiness to live among homeless children, towards whom in [her] early youth, her heart inclined, became evident by the circumstances that she, who otherwise never uttered a wish, asked to be allowed to die among the homeless poor, if it were not against the Will of God.”115 There were other deaths among the sisters and the girls in the first decades of MSMI’s operation from typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and measles but the sisters persevered—another sister stepping in to fill the void created by the death of one, and the girls did not suffer a lapse in care or education. Eventually, sisters rotated in and out of MSMI as teachers, nurses, caregivers— moving from the orphanage to the provincial house and back again. This plan allowed the nuns the opportunity to rest and recover from their responsibilities in one area of their charitable work by focusing mind and body on different charitable activities. Physical and emotional exhaustion

114 “Mount St. Mary’s Institute Records: MEMORIES of Sister Mary Jane Berg,” 5, SND-Chardon. 115Annals, 5, SND-Chardon. 181

24:11 among orphanage caregivers across the religious spectrum was typical for the period. By 1914, sisters from the provincial house were venturing to MSMI on sabbatical: “About 30 sisters spent their vacation at St. Mary’s. After a month another party arrived to make place for the first ones in the provincial house. This change brought variety to the usual run of affairs. The woods attributed such to the health and recreations of the sisters.”116

Similar in tone and subject matter to the Annals of the SND sisters at St. Aloysius, the

Annals of MSMI memorialize the passing of the sisters and that of the children in their care.

They also reflect the importance that the sisters assigned to what they chose to memorialize beyond this loss of members of the community. These reflections included spiritual matters as well as the recognition of the entry of several of the girls raised in the MSMI into the novitiate.

As with the reminiscences in the St. Aloysius Annals, these orphans were remembered with a fondness not afforded other girls when they left MSMI. During the 1910s, the population of girls exceeded more than 100, cared for by twelve to fifteen sisters. Making do with less became a way of life as MSMI was perpetually short on funds. As an adult (and sister of the order), who was herself a former childhood resident of MSMI recounted: “In a separate building, on the first floor, huge loaves of bread were baked. I do not remember ever having anything for breakfast but a large peace (sic) of butter bread and coffee. I do not remember ever having fruit, or cereal, or milk.”117

Nevertheless, 1919 ushered in a positive change in MSMI’s financial well-being: “We were told to place our Institute under the care of the Welfare Federation, so that we might be supported financially from the Community Chest, to which all people are asked to contribute.”118

116 Ibid., 16. 117 “Letter from Sister Mary Jane Berg, SND to Sister Lucille Marie Nuncia, Dated Jan. 9, 1984,” Mount St. Mary’s Institute Records: Reminiscences, SND-Chardon. 118 Ibid., 23. 182

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The Welfare Federation’s first year grant to MSMI was $2,000—the sisters “praised God” that

they were finally able to pay their bills.119 The following year, the State of Ohio charged the

newly authorized Department of Public Welfare with the responsibility of monitoring prisons,

hospitals, and orphanages throughout the state. The Department’s Division of Charities “sent an

inspector to see if the institute complies with the rules for caring of children.”120 By virtue of

their inclusion of excerpts from these state evaluations in the Annals, it is apparent that the

sisters were gratified by the assessments that included comments such as:

particularly liked the care you have taken to insure privacy in bathing for each child . . . congratulate you upon providing each child with a place she can call her own in which she can store her own small treasures … we believe St. Mary’s gives special attention to each child as an individual, seeking to encourage talents, correct defects, and develop each girl according to her capacity.121

In 1919, with nearly 150 girls in their care, the sisters also undertook a new system of

recordkeeping that forced them to revisit the admissions information on every child brought into

MSMI over the previous thirty-five years: “These records are arranged alphabetically and state

the necessary information about the family and child. So, we learn the pitiful conditions of the

children.”122 And the conditions of many of the girls prior to their arrival at MSMI were indeed

sobering. Death, divorce, desertion, and disease had untethered these girls from their families:

Eight-year-old Fanny and her two-year-old sister Mary, were typical. Their father was in the penitentiary and their mother had deserted them. There was nine-year old Elizabeth whose father had died and whose mother was an inmate at the state mental hospital at Newburgh. Five-year- old Josephine’s parents had divorced, and the mother remarried, but she left her daughter in the care of the child’s grandmother who was unable to provide for her. Forty percent of the girls who

119 Ibid., 35. 120 Ibid., 33. 121 Ibid., 34 122 Annals, 22, SND-Chardon. 183

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called MSMI home were eventually reclaimed by a surviving parent after as little as six months

or as long as four years, but the remaining girls spent their childhood and adolescence with the

sisters.123

In 1927, the Sisters of Notre Dame confronted a previously unimaginable event. The

MSMI property was being taken to be sold by the diocese to another religious order. For months,

the possibility had been the subject of community gossip, but the nuns still did not believe the

rumors were true:

During these weeks … we were frequently annoyed by strange priests and people, who would come with their machines on our grounds and as soon as they notice a sister turn right around. We did not know it at the time but that they were Benedictine Fathers and Slovak priests. Why would they not face the sisters and ask to be shown around? We sisters here were sorely put to a trial; we should not think of it that St. Mary’s would be sold, but we heard it from outsiders.124

The MSMI property was sold at the direction of the diocese to the Order of St. Benedict to be

used as Benedictine High School.125 The sisters were given until July of 1929 to vacate the premises. They found places for more than 100 of the younger girls at St. Joseph’s Orphanage and the older girls were sent to the Catholic Young Women’s Hall, previously established during the tenure of Bishop Farrelly. The sisters returned to the provincial house on Ansel Road and continued to serve the community from there for the next three decades. In the early 1960s, they acquired sixty plus acres of land in Chardon, in suburban Geauga County, on which they began to build for the next phase of their mission. The Sisters of Notre Dame now operate the Notre

Dame Cathedral, Notre Dame Elementary School, and Notre Dame-Cathedral Latin High

123 A sampling of admissions records from the Institute from 1884 to 1929. “Mount St. Mary’s Records/A-C/D-K/L-R/S-Z,” SND-Chardon. 124 Ibid., 39. 125 Originally intended to educate boys among the Slovakian immigrant community, Benedictine High School remains a boys-only secondary school that has expanded its facilities from the original Buckeye Road to include property around the corner on what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard. 184

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School. Pious Catholics who sought to care for orphans also did so even without the sanction of the church, yet the children who were part of those communities did not suffer for the lack of official approbation.

“Mother” Ellen Evangeline Donovan and her sisters, both biological and spiritual, cared for orphaned siblings in a residential setting where the children maintained their familial relationships in the Home of the Holy Family (Holy Family). Born to first-generation Irish

Catholic immigrants in 1854, and one of four daughters, Ellen wanted more than anything to serve in a religious community and care for children. As author Maureen Fitzgerald has argued,

Catholic women of modest means, like Donovan, who wished to embark on a life religious, were often relegated to the role of a lay sister in nineteenth-century American convents.126 In reality, these lay sisters were glorified domestics whose service was not to humanity but to the “choir sisters” whose financial means freed them for a “higher purpose.”127

Holy Family was a non-sanctioned order of Catholic women religious, founded by

Donovan and her sister Theresa. The Donovan sisters operated the first Holy Family in their sister Margaret’s home on East Madison Street. Rather than following the contemporary practice of separating siblings, Donovan kept orphaned sisters and brothers together as a family unit, specifically because their families had already been shattered by poverty, illness, or death. She was ahead of her time in that regard, according to the Cleveland social workers who knew her.128

The stigma of being parentless was a heavy enough burden for these children to bear, and so the children of Holy Family attended local schools, returning to a home rather than an orphanage in

126 Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830-1920 (University of Illinois Press, 2006), 34. 127 Ibid. 128 “Sister, Niece of Founder Await Jubilee,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), Mar. 30, 1945, n.p., FCCS/CCC Records, Orphanages: Holy Family Orphanage, ADC. 185

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the afternoon, just like their classmates. “Home” was a term Donovan insisted upon, because she

felt strongly that children ought not be disparaged for growing up in an “orphanage.”129

Donovan repeatedly reached out to the diocesan authorities over the years about her

dearly held goal of founding a religious community in Cleveland that was sanctioned by the diocese to serve poor children who had lost one or both parents. She received no response, let alone encouragement for these aspirations in corresponding directly with Bishop Horstmann, so she sought help from her local priest. In 1899, Donovan reached out to Father William

McMahon of St. Bridget’s Church in Cleveland’s Central District asking him to intercede on the home’s behalf with the bishop. She wrote, in part: “I am going to ask a favor of you. Will you kindly go to our Rt. Rev. Bishop and speak to him for me. I feel as if I don’t want to go to him for he will not listen to me if I do and cuts me off so short that I don’t feel like offering my heart and my mind to him.”130 She was concerned that without the bishop’s support, the members of

the Holy Family religious community were in limbo—deeply Catholic—living as members of a

religious order—doing important charitable work—but without the imprimatur of official church

sanction.

Her entreaties met increasingly antagonistic resistance. Moreover, the diocese refused to

approve of these women wearing the religious habits of other orders that enjoyed official church

sanction. Donovan felt that forbidding her and her community from wearing a religious habit

prevented them from being able to raise funds through face-to-face solicitation and that they were thus at the mercy of imposters who claimed to raise money in Holy Family’s name; funds that it never received. McMahon transmitted Donovan’s letter to Horstmann on June 9, 1899

129 “Society of the Holy Family,” 3, FCCS/CCC Records, Orphanages: Holy Family Orphanage, ADC. 130 “Letter from Ellen E. Donovan to Father William McMahon dated Jun. 3, 1899,” FCCS/CCC Records, Box 16, Ignatius Horstmann Papers (II): Institutions: Holy Family Orphanage, ADC. 186

24:11 under a separate cover letter in which he stated: “While it does not appear to have been intended for your eyes, I have decided that it would be well for you to peruse it. I believe this … relieves me of responsibility toward the sender.”131 It was obvious that the priest from St. Bridget’s and the bishop were antipathetic to Donovan’s appeals.132 Bishop Horstmann’s files do not reflect that he ever responded directly to Donovan’s concerns.

By this time there were almost forty children being cared for in the home. Holy Family moved in 1896 from Margaret Haywood’s home to a house on Woodland Avenue. In 1903, older, and bit bolder, Donovan wrote Bishop Horstmann again with her request for official church sanction—this time directly: “In regard to the proper Roman authority of starting a new community we are willing to accept any rule Roam (sic) might lay down for us as long as it gave us the privilege of going on with our work. Our work is surely in need of a religious body to bring it out and make of it what it should be.”133 Once again, her appeals to the bishop went unanswered and the women who administered Holy Family remained in administrative purgatory, unable to secure the status of sanctioned order but unwilling either to abandon their work or the children they served. Undeterred by the lack of official support, Donovan’s novitiate

Margaret Loretta “Mary” Henry and several other members of the Cleveland Home of the Holy

Family community opened a second home in New Castle, Pennsylvania, northwest of

Pittsburgh.134

131 “Letter from Father William McMahon to Bishop Ignatius F. Horstmann dated Jun. 9, 1899,” FCCS/CCC Records, Box 16, Ignatius Horstmann Papers (II): Institutions: Holy Family Orphanage, ADC. 132 Ibid. 133 “Letter from Ellen E. Donovan to Bishop Ignatius F. Horstmann dated Feb. 19, 1903,” FCCS/CCC Records, Box 16, Ignatius Horstmann Papers (II): Institutions: Holy Family Orphanage, ADC. 134 Margaret Loretta “Mary” Henry is routinely identified in the literature as having been legally adopted by Ellen Donovan but records, if they exist, are not part of the public domain. Jeff Bales, Jr. “Holy Family Home/Margaret Henry Home – New Castle PA,” Lawrence County Memories, http://www.lawrencecountymemoirs.com/lcmpages/285/holy-family. 187

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Holy Family continued to care for children when it moved to its final location on Puritas

Avenue in Cleveland’s West Side in 1911. Twenty years, and two bishops later, Ellen Donovan

was nearing the end of her life. She had outlasted both Bishop Horstmann and his successor

Bishop John Farrelly, during whose tenure the Holy Family finally began to receive regular

disbursements from Cleveland’s Catholic Charities Corporation. Time and proof of Holy

Family’s commitment to its work eventually softened the relationship between Donovan and the

bishop of Cleveland. Perhaps her longevity and willingness to undertake her work without

official church sanction for her little religious community earned her a certain amount of respect

and affection within the diocese, or perhaps Bishop Joseph Schrembs was more favorably

disposed to her efforts. Just after the first of the year in 1933, Donovan wrote Schrembs

regarding her planning for Holy Family’s operations upon her passing. He responded warmly:

“My Dear Mother Donovan: I thank you for your kind letter of January 13, and I understand your

desire to see things settled before the good Lord calls you to your reward. I am glad that you feel

you have someone who may be able to take up the work you have so splendidly carried on.”135

Holy Family cared for its children in residence until Donovan and her sister died, Ellen in

1939 and Theresa the following year. After their passing, a sanctioned order of women religious, the Sisters of the Incarnate Word, managed the home until it closed in 1952. The children were then relocated to the diocesan-run Parmadale facility. Looking back, Ellen Donovan was remembered by representatives of the diocese for the noble nature of her work, whether it was given official sanction by the Catholic church or not. In fact, the entry for Holy Family in the

Diocese of Cleveland’s 1948 “Report of Charitable and Social Welfare Institutions” states in part:

135 “Letter from Bishop Joseph Schrembs to Mother Ellen E. Donovan dated Jan. 16, 1933,” FCCS/CCC Records, Schrembs: Institutions: Holy Family Home, 1933, 1935, 1939, ADC. 188

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The home owes its existence to the kind heart and undauntable energy of Mother E. Donovan … Holy Family, a participating agency of the Welfare Federation and Catholic Charities Corporation exists for the particular purpose of keeping together homeless brothers and sisters and thus so far as possible preserving family affection, ties, and spirit.136

Finally, there was an affirmation of the work undertaken by the small group of devoted Catholic women. Although the church did not reward them with the official sanction Ellen Donovan desired, her mission was fulfilled, nevertheless. Cleveland’s increasingly diverse Catholic community supported several avenues for the care of its parentless children, whether through official diocesan administration, the persistence of Catholic nuns, or the faith of a determined laity. Pittsburgh’s challenges were even more pronounced as a result of its explosive growth, its ethnic diversity, and the crush of industrialization. The response of Pittsburgh’s Catholic community had to be equal to similar challenges.

Pittsburgh

Despite the nativist rhetoric and colorful resistance, the Catholic community of Pittsburgh responded to the needs of the city’s Catholic orphans by casting its net of care widely. St. Joseph, the patron saint of workers and the universal church, was Pittsburgh’s most revered saint. There were “19 churches, one orphan asylum, two convents, one protectory, one hospital, one academy, one home for the aged and four missions dedicated in his honor.”137 Pittsburgh’s population size, ethnic diversity, and topographical challenges made for a comprehensive

Catholic cultural experience, but many Catholics looked to St. Joseph for protection and intervention on behalf of their entreaties to God.

136 “Report of Charitable and Social Welfare Institutions: 1948,” FCCS/CCC Records, Orphanages: 1883- 1891, ADC. 137 “Churches to Observe Feast of St. Joseph: Special Services Will Be Held by Catholics in Honor of Patron,” Pittsburgh Daily Post (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Sun., Mar. 12, 1911, 36. 189

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The first Catholic orphanage founded in the city was St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Orphan

Asylum of Pittsburgh (St. Paul’s) established in 1838 by the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph, a

provincial house of the Sisters of Charity from Emmitsburg, Maryland. The asylum’s first home

sat a block from the Monongahela River on Second Street and the sisters cared exclusively for

girls. In the earliest days of St. Paul’s operation, the sisters and the orphans spent hours each day

just securing water for laundry, bathing, and drinking. With no running water on the property,

the sisters and children trudged from St. Paul’s at the top of the hill down to the river and back;

only a block away, but down a steep incline and back up again.138 St. Paul’s moved to Webster

Avenue and Chatham Street between downtown and the Hill District in 1843, where it had

running water and operated under the name “St. Paul’s Female Orphan Asylum.” By 1849, boys

were also taken in under the St. Paul’s charitable umbrella but were sent to live on a farm in rural

Lawrence County where they were cared for by the Franciscan Brothers. In 1851, the boys were

moved to a facility on Pius Street in South Side (known as the St. Paul’s Male Orphan Asylum),

administered by the Sisters of Mercy who had taken over running St. Paul’s from the secular

administrators when the Sisters of Charity were recalled to their order’s motherhouse in 1845.

Following the end of the U.S. Civil War, the girls and boys were moved together to a new facility on Tannehill Street in Canonsburg to the west of the city. Children who entered St. Paul’s during this time expected to become indentured to the orphanage once they became old enough to work.139 They made their final move to a combined campus on Noblestown Road in

138 “History.” St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum of the City of Pittsburgh, Souvenir Program on the Occasion of the Centenary Celebration, April 10, 1940, 6-7. Archives of the Diocese of Pittsburgh (ADP), Box 2209, Hospitals and Health Care, St. Paul’s. 139 “Indenture.” St. Paul’s R.C. Orphan Asylum, ADP, Box 2209, Hospitals and Health Care, St. Paul’s, Miscellaneous. 190

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Fig. 21 - “St. Paul’s R. C. Orphan Asylum: Crafton Station, Pittsburgh, Pa.”140

Crafton Station in 1903. At its height, the population of children in residence at the orphanage in the facility on Noblestown Road reached 1,200 between the ages of three and fifteen.141The campus in Crafton was impressive, with several three-story buildings that included dormitories, a chapel, and a school. It occupied nearly eighteen acres in southwestern Pittsburgh and operated until 1965 when it was merged with the Holy Family Institute. But just as Pittsburgh’s Catholics had populated their neighborhoods with national churches, they also undertook building separate orphanages that operated outside the daily control of the diocese.

The St. Joseph’s Protectory for Homeless Boys and Industrial School (Protectory) was founded by Bishop Richard Phelan in 1893 to satisfy “the urgent need of an Institution to care for the army of homeless, destitute and unprotected boys of the city of Pittsburgh, and towns of

140 “St. Paul’s R. C. Orphan Asylum: Crafton Station, Pittsburgh, Pa: A monument to the charity of the Pittsburgh Diocese has been a home to thousands of children in a century of service.” St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum of the City of Pittsburgh, Souvenir Program on the Occasion of the Centenary Celebration, April 10, 1940, 19. ADP, Box 2209, Hospitals and Health Care, St. Paul’s. 141 Father Charles Bober, “St. Paul Orphanage Interests Reader,” Pittsburgh Catholic, June 1991 (n.p.) ADP, Box 2209, Hospitals and Health Care, St. Paul’s, News Clippings. 191

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the diocese, the erection of a home to save them from drifting into criminal lives was

advanced.142 The Protectory was open to “honest, industrious, homeless boys, no matter the

language or nationality of their parents,” ages eight to eighteen.143 It was administered by

members of the Franciscan Brothers, the Brothers of our Lady of Lourdes, and diocesan clergy.

The first trade to be introduced to the boys in 1896 was printing. Over the years, additional

trades were introduced such as mechanic, cobbling, coopering, and blacksmithing, among others.

Typical of other institutional settings of the day, close quarters ensured fertile breeding grounds for contagious diseases in the Protectory. The fall of 1906 was particularly dangerous when spinal meningitis, typhoid, diphtheria, scarlet fever and pneumonia all made the rounds among the boys and staff. More problematic, of course, was that these were adolescents and teenagers who were not restricted to the Protectory property twenty-four hours a day. They were in the community an average of six days a week, ten to twelve hours a day. Not only did they bring illness from the Protectory to their places of employment, they also brought whatever they were exposed to outside the Protectory, home.144 In the fall of 1907, the Protectory undertook a

campaign to fund the construction of a new facility that bifurcated the Protectory and its mission

into separate facilities. One for schoolboys and one for working boys. The first step came at a

meeting of the St. Joseph Protectory League held on December 10, 1907 when a letter from the

Protectory’s superintendent, Father Rockliff, was read. In part, Rockliff was concerned that the

Protectory had not been able to solve the problems of homelessness among Pittsburgh’s young

boys:

142 “Silver Jubilee: St. Joseph’s Protectory for Homeless Boys” (Program), 5, ADP, Box 2209, Hospitals and Health Care, St. Joseph’s. 143 Ibid. 144 “Case of Spotted Fever: Inmate of St. Joseph’s Protectory Stricken with Cerebro-Spinal Meningitis,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Sun., Oct. 7, 1906, 15. 192

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We have, unfortunately, two distinct issues to deal with … The working boys, employed in the city, pay a small sum to the protectory for their board and lodging … The school boys (sic) form a mixed class: some are homeless, others have had homes, whilst a few are committed to us by the juvenile court for truancy and minor faults, into which the boy would not have fallen had his home circumstances been what they should be … We have the homeless, the delinquent and the working boy to take care of and educate in the one institution known as St. Joseph’s protectory. Some are opposed to our receiving delinquent children, though there is not another Catholic institution in the diocese which will accept them. 145

Rockliff wanted league members, and in allowing publication of the contents of the letter, the wider Catholic community, to understand that two institutional formats were optimal in being able to deal with boys who needed intervention and protection in order to become contributing members of society. He further emphasized the importance of the Protectory as a critical part of the solution within the Catholic community when dealing with boys who had come into contact with the juvenile justice system:

To open our doors to the juvenile court, which handles more Catholic children than any other. If we refuse delinquent boys they are sent to the State reform schools, where by (sic) far the most of them may be counted as lost souls … The worst prisoners in our penitentiaries, workhouses and other houses of correction are those who, as boys, were inmates of State reform schools …146

In effect, saving these boys was a mission of the Protectory because even other Catholic institutions were unwilling to take children from the juvenile courts. This was certainly a noble social goal. The idea was that these boys, and those who were simply homeless, he said:

… could be trained together, for in our experience, we find that the former surroundings of the homeless boy demand as much discipline is as required for the delinquent. This institution should be a protectory in the full sense of the term, and a thoroughly well-equipped industrial school in which the most useful trades would be taught. The discipline should be of a military nature, otherwise such children will not be successfully controlled.147

145 “St. Joseph’s Protectory Looks for New Home: Supt. Rockliff Outlines Needs of Institution that Has Done Valuable Work: Bettering Conditions: Says that Boys Require Different Training and Apprenticeship,” Pittsburgh Daily Post (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Wed., Dec. 11, 1907, 2. 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid. 193

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He added that the working boys who required only a clean, safe place to live while they were working or learning a trade “should be without the slightest taint of institutional life” and located in a “respectable neighborhood, where the surroundings cannot but have a refining effect.”148 In effect, the plan for a separate home for industrious Catholic boys was a finishing school for young men who had no previous problems with discipline or self-control:

… A home of this kind will undoubtedly attract the attention of our wealthier neighbors who would be invited to visit the boys in their comfortable and respectable dwelling; the invitation would naturally be returned when our boy will at least find himself in that society for which he has so gradually trained. As soon as he is fitted to move in such society he should be boarded and lodged with some interested family, though still under the supervision of the home, until he is able to make his own first little home.149

Rockliff championed the “good Catholic home” theory espoused by the Sisters of Notre Dame and practiced by the Herschedes, except on an institutional scale. New facilities with separate missions was the method for fulfilling the overarching goal: “To protect, educate and save our poor Catholic boys the work for which the present institution was established we should have our protectory outside the city and our home for industrious boys in a respectable suburb …”150

Rockliff closed on a hopeful, if overly optimistic, note: “Several influential business men are taking much interest in the proposition, and we feel sure, judging from past experience, that all the members of St. Joseph’s Protectory league, as well as every friend of our homeless boys, will give their generous co-operation in the difficult work we now have before us.”151 Unfortunately, the far-sighted Rockliff was unable to convince the bishop, league members, or private

148 Ibid. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid. 194

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businessmen to support his crusade for separate facilities. The Protectory continued to operate as

a single institution and closed in the early 1950s.

St. Anthony’s Orphanage was chartered in 1921 by Italian immigrant families who were

members of several Italian-language parishes with oversight of the diocese under the

management of Father Bonaventure Piscopo of Immaculate Conception Church. The Italian

community was notified of the success of their proposal in an October 20, 1920 letter from

Bishop Canevin: “The crowded condition of all institutions for homeless children, the increasing

Italian population, and the duty of providing for the children of their race, are sufficient reason

for the undertaking.”152 The bishop viewed this first charitable outreach by the Italian immigrant

community as a precursor for future efforts: “open(ing) the way for their activity and progress in

other fields of charitable, social, and patriotic endeavor.”153 The home opened with twenty-four children, and despite its initial plan to limit their outreach to the Italian community, it admitted

Catholic children of every nationality.154 The orphanage was based in Oakmont, north of the city

along the Allegheny River and was operated by the order of women religious, the Apostles of the

Sacred Heart of Jesus, founded in Viareggio, Italy in 1894.155 The first group of the Italian sisters arrived in the United States in 1902 and established an orphanage and school in New York

City. Piscopo brought a cohort of the sisters to Pittsburgh in 1921 and St. Anthony’s operated as

152 “Letter from Bishop Regis Canevin to Rev. Father Bonaventure (Piscopo), et al., Dated Oct. 20, 1920,” ADP, Box 2505, Hospitals – Health Care Services, St. Anthony’s Orphanage. 153 Ibid. 154 Helen Glenn Tyson, Staff-Pittsburgh Child Welfare Study, “St. Anthony’s Orphanage” dated as of May 30, 130, 2., ADP, Box 2505, Hospitals – Health Care Services, Welfare Fund of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. 155 “Missionary Zelatrices of the Sacred Heart,” Catholic Transcript, Vol. LXVIII, No. 49, Apr. 1, 1966, CatholicNewsArchive.org, https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/?a=d&d=CTR19660401-01.2.118.16. The order’s name was changed to “Missionary Zelatrices” as a reflection of the founder’s desire to mirror the apostolic zeal of the twelve apostles. It returned to its original name, Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in 1911. 195

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an orphanage and school until 1953 when it was transformed to a school for children with

disabilities. It was renamed St. Anthony’s Family Village to mark the transformation.

As in Cleveland and Cincinnati, Pittsburgh’s Catholic community supported several

orphanages outside of the daily control of the diocese. The first of these was founded by the

German Catholics whose home parish was St. Philomena’s Church at the corner of Fourteenth

Street and Liberty Avenue in the Strip District. The parish began as “the Factory Church” located

on the second floor of a former cotton textile factory.156 Its second pastor, Father John Neumann

(later Saint John Neumann), oversaw construction of the parish’s first consecrated building.157

The St. Joseph German Orphan Asylum was established by the School Sisters of Notre Dame in

1849.158 The asylum followed the parish to its new building in Squirrel Hill in 1853 and

originally housed twenty-four orphans. The building was destroyed by fire the following year but no children or adults were injured. The orphans were housed in a temporary facility until the asylum was rebuilt. Unlike many of the city’s orphanages that operated during the nineteenth century, half-orphans outnumbered full orphans at St. Joseph’s. The facility was closed in 1938.

The Roselia Foundling and Maternity Asylum was founded in 1891 and staffed by the

Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill who had established a provincial house in Pittsburgh in 1869.

During their first twenty years of providing pastoral services in the city, the sisters staffed twenty

parochial schools, founded the St. Mary School for Boys, and the St. Joseph Academy for Girls.

They opened Roselia to fill a void in the care for unwed mothers and their babies in Pittsburgh’s

156 Patricia Bartos, “From the Point to the Strip,” PittsburghCatholic.org, Feb. 6, 2004, https://www.pittsburghcatholic.org/News/from-the-point-to-the-strip. 157 In fact, one miracle credited to Father Neumann during the beatification process was his construction of the St. Philomena church building “without funds.” Bartos, “From the Point to the Strip.” 158 The School Sisters of Notre Dame religious order was founded in Germany in 1833 and the first contingent of sisters arrived in America in 1847. “Call to America,” School Sisters of Notre Dame, https://ssnd.org/about-us/our-history/call-america/. 196

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Catholic community: “Our work with unmarried mothers was the real work of Saint Vincent.

Hidden and quiet, this charity to rejected women and their babies overflowed into our own

community life. We found Christ within the Roselia community, most certainly.”159 This encapsulation of St. Roselia’s mission statement and history could apply to many of the religiously-affiliated childcare institutions, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish. Staff, volunteers, and organizers were cognizant of the presence of God in their mission and in the importance to the mission’s success.

St. Rita’s Home for Infants was founded in February 1914 to care for babies and toddlers under the age of three. The idea for the home grew out of the charity of the Ladies’ Catholic

Benevolent Association of Western Pennsylvania. It operated in a private home on Greenfield

Avenue and nurses and female volunteers cared for as many as nineteen babies and toddlers at a time. In 1917, it moved into its third and final location in the old St. Paul’s Orphan Asylum on

Tannehill Street in the Hill District that had been renovated and equipped to care for infants. At that time, it came under the administration of the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, and space grew exponentially with room for more than 200 infants. By the summer of 1921, more than 1,400 babies and toddlers had spent significant time in the home in its first seven years.160

Unfortunately, it closed in April of 1935 at the height of the Great Depression.

Two-year old Margaret Loretta “Mary” Henry and her six-year old sister Sara were

placed in diocesan-run St. Joseph’s Orphanage for Girls in Cleveland by their mother following

their father’s death in 1880. Around Margaret’s eighth birthday, she joined Sara at Saint Mary’s

Orphan Asylum for older girls where she remained until she was adopted by Mother Ellen

159 “Roselia Foundling and Maternity Asylum: A Refuge and Restorer,” Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill, scsh.org, https://scsh.org/about-us/history/roselia-foundling-and-maternity-asylum/. 160 “Home for Infants,” Pittsburgh Daily Post (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Sun., Jun. 26, 1921, 15. 197

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Donovan of Cleveland’s Holy Family. Mary remained in Cleveland until 1903 when, at the age

of twenty-five and under the mentorship of Mother Donovan, she and a small contingent of other

women from the Cleveland Holy Family Home moved to New Castle, Pennsylvania to establish

a Holy Family Home there (Holy Family II), fifty miles from Pittsburgh. They brought six

orphans with them from Cleveland.

Local press coverage in New Castle indicated that Mother Donovan was in charge of

Holy Family II but she remained in Cleveland.161 It is possible this minor subterfuge was part of

the original plan, inasmuch as Mary Henry was only twenty-five years old at the time, a tender age for such a responsibility. The home filed for a charter from the state of Pennsylvania four years later. In their application, they broadened the mission of the home to include orphans and homeless children “regardless of their religious denomination.”162 The original facility was in a

temporary location in New Castle’s downtown area but moved within a year to a larger property

with two homes on an acre of land just outside of the city limits. Once relocated, Holy Family II

operated in the larger of the two homes on the property and Mary Henry and the sisters rented

out the second home, at ten dollars a month to help defray the twenty-five dollar a month rent on

the property.

In 1919, the New Castle News published a flattering article about Holy Family II and the

emotional and physical wellbeing of the children who lived there: “they are taken care of, are

fed, clothed, reared, educated, and given the advantages of a home life as nearly as possible, and,

despite their unfortunate circumstances, they are treated as loved children.”163 Most of the thirty

161 “Orphan Home to Be Established Here: Society of the Holy Family are Opening an Institution on Lincoln Avenue: Under Auspices of the Catholic Church,” New Castle News (New Castle, Pennsylvania), Wed., Sep. 23, 1903, n.p. 162 “Charter Notice,” New Castle News (New Castle, Pennsylvania), Wed., Mar. 27, 1907, n. 163 “Twenty-Six Children in a Single Home: However All Are Not in Same Family – Represent Many Families,” New Castle News (New Castle, Pennsylvania), Wed., Feb. 24, 1919, n.p. 198

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to fifty children in the home at any particular point were half- and full-orphans, but there were also children removed by local authorities from abusive homes and homes where one or both parents were unable to care for their children. To the women who administered Holy Family II, this was a labor of love – they were entirely dependent on private charity as the state of

Pennsylvania made no appropriations for the home in its budget.164 During the first seventeen

years of Holy Family II’s operations, more than 2,500 children were cared for. A public appeal

was made in 1921 for funds to allow them to purchase the property outright, before they lost

their lease or had to pay a rent that had been increased by three hundred percent after the

property was purchased by an investor in Chicago. Eventually, the new owner acquiesced to

public pressure and allowed the orphans and Mary Henry and her staff to remain at a stable

rental payment. Holy Family II closed in 1954.

***

Roman Catholics represent the major minority religion in the United States. Catholics operated as outsiders in virtually every city and state in which they took up residence following the arrival of the first Catholics in the Atlantic coast colonies in the late seventeenth century.

They were benignly marginalized until the eighteenth century when their numbers become statistically significant as Catholic immigrants began to arrive in greater numbers. First came the

Germans, then the Irish, and over time, the Italians, Poles, Slovaks, and Romanians, who were increasingly poor and uneducated. Demonized as blind followers of the Roman church hierarchy that allegedly sought to infiltrate and overthrow the democratic values and republican freedoms of the United States, Catholics, despite a profound desire to enjoy newfound freedoms, were forced to defend their Americanness while maintaining their Catholic faith.

164 Ibid. 199

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These Catholic Americans faced increasing resistance to their faith and their efforts to become equal members of American society. Political parties that actively besmirched and undermined Catholicism, members of the clergy of the dominant Protestant denominations that either out of fear or ignorance, sowed seeds of mistrust from their own pulpits, and editors, publishers, reporters, and cartoonists from the popular press spread misinformation and half- truths from the pages of their dailies and weeklies that influenced public opinion about the

Catholic faith. European Catholics brought with them a respect for traditional hierarchy that conflicted with certain American ideals. But their reverence for the power of charity and charitable works meant that Catholic children orphaned by parental death or desertion were eligible for care in any number of institutions founded and supported by their local diocese or concerned Catholics outside of direct diocesan control. Principally staffed by women religious of a number of orders, these orphanages, asylums, institutes, and homes were more than refuges from mean streets, they were schools, places of religious inculcation, and homes, at least in intent if not always in outcome. Where the nuns counted on a supportive church hierarchy and the community, conditions were loving and efficacious. Where children and staff were deprived of a steady supply of food and means for minimal support, especially in the early days, life was hard and comfort a rare commodity.

Efforts of individuals such as the Herschedes, Mother Donovan, and Margaret Henry have been overshadowed in the larger picture of Catholic institutional care, but all efforts to aid orphaned and homeless Catholic children were ultimately valuable pieces of the charitable puzzle. The stories of these Catholic individuals and the children and families they aided are also a key to opening the door of one aspect of society’s response to the growing population of orphaned and abandoned children at the time. These efforts provided stability for vulnerable

200

24:11 children, alternately complementing, and competing with other sectarian, and even secular child- saving programs of the day. The changes that started to transform charitable funding and child welfare within American Catholicism, rippled through the Jewish community’s child welfare outreach as well. The transformation was rewarding, and stressful, for the children and administrators of the Jewish orphanages as they also faced challenges from within and outside the diverse American Jewish experience, and from a troubling antisemitic sentiment in American society.

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Chapter 5 Diaspora in Retrograde: The Jewish Community’s Regional Response

There may be differences of opinion regarding the degree to which Jews have become rooted in America (and how strong and secure these roots are), but it is a fact that our right to live here as Americans and as Jews is not questioned. It is also true that, without any interest on the part of the law or of the authorities to erase Jewish identity, pressures producing this effect are consciously or unconsciously exerted by the environment to which we are subject. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise … basically a traditional Jew whose destiny it was to lay a strong foundation for the Reform movement … in America, once stated (naturally employing the terms and images of his time): ‘There [were] Episcopalian Jews in New York, Quaker Jews in Philadelphia, Huguenot Jews in Charleston, [and so on], everywhere [according to the prevailing sect]….’13” His statement was no doubt exaggerated, but no one will deny that no matter how Jewish we feel and how hard we try to preserve our Jewishness, the surrounding environment imposes its stamp upon us. It were not normal were it otherwise. The question is how great is this American influence today and how much greater is it likely to become in time, and whether there does not exist a grave danger that the specific Jewishness of which we are still the bearers may not in time become totally atrophied.1

The relationships among Jews, Catholics, and Protestants in the American Midwest were critical to American Jewish acculturation, but what did American Jews risk in exchange for communal goodwill? Although Greenberg’s essay excerpted above was written in the mid-twentieth century, it was based in the observations he made during travels throughout the United States a generation earlier. Such observations are important in setting the stage for a discussion of how

Jews accommodated an American reality to the Jewish experience in the Midwest of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, holding onto Jewish identity and traditions of faith while achieving full participation in the American experience. In this chapter, the discussion turns to the importance of the Midwest cities of this study to the growth and cohesiveness of American Reform Judaism,

1 Hayim Greenberg, “The Future of American Jewry,” The Essential Hayim Greenberg: Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism & Zionism, Mark A. Raider, ed. (University of Alabama Press, 2017), 333. In-quotation note 13 is quoted from Isaac Mayer Wise, Reminiscences, ed. and trans. David Philipson (Leo Wise and Company, 1901), 79. 202

24:11 the impact of reforms on American Jewish communities as they integrated themselves into the larger American populace, and how these efforts influenced communal decisions regarding the care of dependent children. In particular, discussion highlights the gathering of orphans and abandoned children into large institutions operated by the International Order of B’nai B’rith

(B’nai B’rith or IOBB) that were often far from the children’s hometowns. I discuss the establishment of other Jewish orphanages in the Midwest during this period that operated apart from the B’nai B’rith homes, within and outside of the Orthodox tradition, as well as the individuals who took on significant roles in establishing orphanages that filled gaps in care and what challenges they faced. That discussion leads to an assessment of how the Jewish community’s efforts on behalf of orphans in the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries in the Midwest were a hybrid of institutional care and individual giving that reflected a balance of both modern Jewish thought and ancient Jewish tenets.2 First, however, let us unpack the ideas within Greenberg’s observations about the efforts of Jews to retain their Jewishness while becoming American, not Americanized.

Judaism is not a monolithic faith anywhere Jews come together in a community of belief.

That is certainly true in the United States. The differences of opinion Greenberg mentions at the beginning of this excerpt from his essay, “The Future of American Jewry” deal with the extent to

2 The notions of charity within Judaism were explained through rabbinical teaching and commentary in the Talmud, where tzedakah gained popular usage to mean charity. It came to reflect rabbinic thought that charity was not so much a gift from the donor but an obligation that was owed to the needy, in effect, their right to assistance. In the Early Middle Ages, charity wardens were responsible for ensuring the collection of funds to be used to aid the needy within Jewish communities, which evolved into the use of charity boxes for collection of funds, and then by charitable associations whose missions included, among others, care of the sick, burial of the dead, and general charity. Beginning in the Modern Era, Jewish charitable practices mirrored the larger societal transformation away from that of direct giving to needy individuals to a system that was monitored and administered by professionals. The first such organizations appeared in the early eighteenth century in Europe and in the nineteenth century in America, as the size of Jewish communities grew and needs increased accordingly. 203

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which social, political, and cultural roots of Jews thrived during the first three centuries of

Jewish life in the United States. Most immigrants who arrived on American shores faced a period

where they were considered the outsiders, the interlopers. For some immigrants, this period was

measured by blinks of an eye in the long day of American history. Other immigrants, including

European Jews, abided outsider status far longer.3 Moreover, the sincerity of the attachment of

American Jews to their country was routinely challenged. Despite this lengthy hangover of

alienation and questioning of patriotic sincerity, American Jews are indeed an intrinsic part of

American life and every expression of the American dream.

Greenberg also observed that Jews were subjected to, and withstood as much as possible,

the “environmental” factors of American life that tend to cherry-pick from among the cultural

contributions of its citizens while homogenizing American immigrants through assimilation and

acculturation. This process exerted pressure on all immigrants, not just Jews, and Greenberg

associated no conscious effort on the part of American authorities to erase the Jewishness of

Jewish Americans. In support of his assertion of the benign nature of this slippery slope toward

an “American identity,” Greenberg recalled a remark made by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, founder

of American Reform Judaism. Wise asserted that American Jews took on certain aspects of the

dominant faith in the cities in which they settled. Wise’s observation did not express fear of, or

anger at, the situation, merely that America was a persuasive companion with a force of

personality that turned the less-committed weak-kneed. Greenberg’s concern was that, over time,

it would be difficult for American Jews to withstand America’s siren song of assimilation and

retain their Jewish identity. Maintaining religious identity was a concern for those who were

3 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998) (Harvard University Press, 1998), 1-12. 204

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interested in providing care for dependent children within the Jewish community at large, as well

as the different faith traditions within Judaism.

Nineteenth-century relationships between American Judaism and the dominant American

Protestantism were always complex, and often a one-sided play for power. American Jews at the

turn of the twentieth century confronted antisemitism when it inhibited their ability to solve

problems, even as it related to orphaned and abandoned Jewish children in the cities of this

study. At times, antisemitism led to physical conflict but not all antisemitism was overtly violent.

Jews were also the subjects of the peculiar antisemitism found in the unwanted missionizing

efforts of some Protestants to convert them to Christianity. Scholar Benny Kraut has argued that:

Missionary activities intensified in specific historical circumstances, and the arrival of the East European Jews sparked renewed efforts that especially targeted children in ghettoes. Mainstream Protestant bodies such as the Episcopalians and Presbyterians justified these endeavors not merely on religious grounds but also with the rationalization that they were necessary for the immigrants’ Americanization.4

Early American Christian missionary efforts to the Jews were benign efforts of charitable

outreach, but as the Jewish population increased, Protestant missionaries who proselytized Jews

were often the same individuals who decried the practice of Protestant orphans, especially girls,

being cared for in Catholic institutions lest they be converted to papists and sent to the nunnery.

Kraut also reasoned that Protestant missionizing was not only to bring souls to Christ and to

assimilate immigrants into the American way of life, but to maintain the dominance of the

Protestant majority by increasing its numbers, whether by conversion or coercion.5 Catholics

from Ireland, Poland, and Italy were also targeted for the civilizing effects of Protestant

conversion but: “East European Jews … bore much of the brunt of the attacks. Leading

4 Benny Kraut, “Jewish Survival in Protestant America,” in Sarna, ed., Minority Faiths, 40, n. 72. 5 Ibid., 41, n. 73. 205

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Protestant clerics and academicians – R. Heber Newton, Washington Gladden, Robert Collyer,

and W. H. Faunce, for example—advanced unsavory public perceptions of Jews as clannish,

unpatriotic … and fomenters of race pride.”6

Late nineteenth-century midwestern antisemitism manifested primarily as acts of the

dysfunctional twins: ignorance and hatred. The former characterization does not dismiss strains

of antisemitism represented by the endemic racist behavior of the latter, all antisemitic behavior

is malignant, especially when it has metastasized. It does differentiate those whose actions were

based in tactless curiosity, from those who claimed a status of superiority based on their own

racial, ethnic, or religious identity. Native-born and immigrant Americans who felt compelled to opine with impunity on why American Jews refused to work on Saturday or declined to send their children to American public schools sat somewhere near the middle of a spectrum of

American antisemitism. Theirs was an inability to intellectually accommodate different paths to assimilation into American culture. With notable exceptions, they were not the ones to overtly assert power or to hold others down to protect their own social status. At the far end of the spectrum sat those who affirmatively chose to attack Jews physically, financially, and socially.

When considered against the backdrop of nationally publicized incidents of antisemitism, intrareligious relationships in the cities of Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh typically represented a less malignant point on the spectrum.

The scholarship that deals specifically with the experience of American Jews and antisemitism in Midwest is limited.7 Nevertheless, there are studies dealing with antisemitism in

6 Ibid., 41, n. 74. 7 See, for example, Stuart Meck, “Zoning and Anti-Semitism in the 1920s: The Case of Cleveland Jewish Orphan Home v. Village of University Heights and Its Aftermath,” Journal of Planning History, 4:2, May 1, 2005, 91-128; Mike Milford, “Veiled Intervention: Anti-Semitism, Allegory, and Captain America,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 20:4 (Winter 2017), 605-634; Judah Rubinstein and Jane Avner, Merging Traditions: Jewish Life in Cleveland, (Kent State University Press, 2004); and Laura Tuennerman- 206

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other areas of the country that help fill the void in the scholarship, until, as historian Jon Lauck

has noted, the nation listens to “the Midwestern voice in American historical writing.”8 Historian

David A. Garber situated nascent American antisemitism in the mid-nineteenth century, but he

also argued that its basis was less one of social interaction than it was of economic interaction.9

American Jewish communities outside of the large population centers of the East (New York,

Philadelphia, and Boston, for example), experienced contact with American Jews and Jewish

immigrants differently. In Garber’s study, focused in the northern industrial city of Buffalo, New

York, antisemitism sprang from the ranks of economically powerful elites, who “contend[ed] for

social dominance and cultural hegemony ….”10 Garber argues that their mistrust of American

Jews, especially those engaged in commerce, was a consequence of the successful record of

Jewish achievement against the American benchmark of the self-made man.11 Regardless,

inasmuch as the United States is a predominantly Protestant Christian nation, “it has always had

an antisemitic bent … from the time of the earliest settlements in North America through the

mid-twentieth century, religious motives were in themselves all that was needed for the

establishment of anti-Jewish bigotry.”12

Kaplan, Helping Others, Helping Ourselves: Power, Giving, and Community Identity in Cleveland, Ohio, 1880-1930,” (Kent State University Press, 2011). 8 Jon Lauck, “The ‘Interior Tradition’ in American History: A Review Essay,” The Annals of Iowa, 69 (Winter 2010), 82-93. 9 David A. Garber, “Cutting Out Shylock: Elite Anti-Semitism and the Quest for Moral Order in the Mid- Nineteenth Century American Market Place,” The Journal of American History, 69:3 (Dec. 1982), 616. 10 Ibid., 634. 11 Ibid. Supporting Garber’s earlier argument are more recent works such as Ryan D. King and Melissa F. Weiner, “Group Position, Collective Threat, and American Anti-Semitism,” Social Problems, 54:1 (2007), 47-77; Leonard Saxe, Theodore Sasson, Graham Wright, Shahar Hecht, “Antisemitism on the College Campus: Perceptions and Realities,” (Brandeis University, Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, 2015) and Donald Pizer, American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather, (University of Illinois Press, 2008). 12 Robert Michael, A Concise History of American Antisemitism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 6. Read in concert with Michael are Yaakov Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America 1880-2000 (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Ariel, An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews (New York University Press, 2013). 207

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At the turn of the twenty-first century, scholarship of American antisemitism continued to

be focused through an economic lens. Historian Rowena Olegario analyzed the notations made in

the process of nineteenth century commercial credit reporting by the forerunner of firms such as

Dun & Bradstreet.13 She argued that while “the absence in Judaism of a central political-

religious authority further distinguished Jews from Catholic immigrants … whose mass arrival

inflamed nativist sentiments and fundamentally altered the American political party system,” the

Jewish communal mindset, necessitated by its history in diaspora, made their integration into the

American commercial credit markets problematic for credit reporters.14 While Jews were

prominent in the business community, their “financing structures were opaque and heavily

dependent on a distribution network that was … close-knit … [thus] American Jews presented an

alternative way of doing business, and one that posed problems for credit reporters whose clients

operated in a dynamic and increasingly competitive environment.”15 To resist the requirement to

accommodate these credit agencies furthered antisemitic bias and the American Jews who

adjusted their operations to American standards found themselves in better stead.16

The relationships between Jews and Christians outside the economic arena were less

adverse and the Jewish communities of Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh were vibrant and

steadfast when it came to social, spiritual, and financial needs among vulnerable co-religionists

from the early-nineteenth century forward. Their efforts on behalf of Jewish orphans, in

13 Rowena Olegario, “‘That Mysterious People’: Jewish Merchants, Transparency and Community in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” Business History Review, 73:2 (Summer 1999), 161-89. 14 Ibid., 161-62. 15 Ibid., 162. 16 More recent scholarship the focuses, or touches on, economic-based antisemitism includes: Hasia R. Diner, How America Met the Jews (Brown Judaic Studies, 2018) 34-35, 42-44; Riv-Ellen Press, “The Economic Turn in American Jewish History: When Women (Mostly) Disappeared,” American Jewish History, 103:4 (2019), 485-512 and Tom W. Smith and Benjamin Schapiro, “Antisemitism in Contemporary America,” American Jewish Yearbook 2018, 2019, 113-161. 208

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particular, reflected a respect for ancient principles of charity manifested in innovation born of

modern necessity. Nevertheless, early internecine battles often marked Jewish community

development, especially in the communities of the Midwest that were founded in the opening

decades of the nineteenth century.

Cincinnati

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Jewish community of Cincinnati

achieved a reputation for interreligious cooperation and assimilation into the broader culture of

the city. In fact, “Ohio’s ‘wandering historian,’ Henry Howe, called it ‘a sort of paradise for the

Hebrews.’”17 Although it came closer than many of its contemporaries, there is a bit of historic

hyperbole in claiming that nineteenth-century Cincinnati was an American Jewish utopia.

Regardless, the characterization was awarded long after internal battles within the city’s Jewish

community that held implications for American Judaism at large had been resolved.18 Cincinnati

was home to the third largest American Jewish community in the mid-nineteenth century and,

according to historian Jonathan D. Sarna, it “occupied a singular position in American Jewish

life. It was the oldest and most cultured Jewish community west of the Alleghenies, and had,

many thought, a spirit all its own.”19 That spirit, truly Zeitgeist, was ingrained in the social,

cultural, and religious fabric of the city.

17 Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio (Norwalk, 1896 [1888]), 787 [originally written in 1877] quoted in Jonathan D. Sarna, “‘A Sort of Paradise for the Hebrews’: The Lofty Vision of Cincinnati Jews,” 1 in Sarna and Klein, The Jews of Cincinnati, 1-21. 18 Although, as American economist and scholar Thomas Sowell has stated: “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.” Thomas Sowell, Interview by Fred Barnes, Aug. 10, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_EtIWmja-4. 19 Jonathan D. Sarna, “‘A Sort of Paradise for the Hebrews’: The Lofty Vision of Cincinnati Jews” in Jonathan D. Sarna and Nancy H. Klein, The Jews of Cincinnati (Center for the Study of the American Jewish Experience, 1989), 1. 209

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In several sources, the first Jewish settler in Cincinnati is identified as Joseph Jonas of

Plymouth, England who arrived in the spring of 1817, although there is evidence that other Jews

passed through Cincinnati or stayed temporarily in the years before Jonas’ arrival.20 Jonas’

memoir, published posthumously by historian Jacob Rader Marcus, highlighted two factors that

made Cincinnati’s early Jewish community different from many other such communities in the

nation: first, a widespread, yet far from unanimous, relaxing of the adherence to Jewish

orthodoxy and second, generally positive Jewish-Christian relationships, on both professional and personal levels. Nevertheless, as Sarna argued:

… social interaction does not necessarily imply complete social acceptance. Much of the interest in local Jews sprang from motives of curiosity ... many of those who befriended Jews continued to hope, with the pious editor of The Western Messenger, that they would ultimately ‘see that Christian principle diffused throughout the earth, is the only power that can restore the scepter to Judah.’21

A review of the milestones achieved by the Jewish community finds construction of the

first synagogue in Cincinnati was commenced in 1835, eleven years after the establishment of

the first congregation, K.K. B’nai Israel.22 The congregation split in 1839 when German-Jewish

families left to establish K.K. B’nai Jeshurun. Beginning in 1846 and into the twentieth century,

seven Orthodox synagogues were founded in Cincinnati: Adath Israel in 1846 for Polish and

German Jews, Congregation Ahabeth Achim in 1847, Shaare Shomayim in 1850, Sherith Israel

in 1855, Bet Tefillah (ca.) 1856, Beth Hamedrash in 1859, and Keneseth Israel in 1931. At the

height of the city’s Jewish population, more than twenty synagogues and congregations served a

diverse community. However, the two most prominent congregations remained K.K. B’nai Israel

20 Ibid. 154-182. 21 Samuel Osgood, “First Synagogue in the West,” The Western Messenger, Sun., Oct. 2, 1836, 205-206, quoted in Sarna, 3. 23 K.K. – Kahal Kadosh (holy congregation). This congregation continues today as K.K. Bene Israel, Rockdale Temple, in Cincinnati’s northern suburbs. 210

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and K.K. B’nai Jeshurun. Historian Karla Goldman has written extensively about the inception

of Cincinnati’s Jewish community, especially the conflicts which exacerbated existing hard

feelings between ultra-traditional Jews (primarily the Sephardic Jews from England and

Amsterdam) and their reform-minded coreligionists (mostly Ashkenazic German Jews) who saw

a way forward that accommodated efforts at modernization.23 The contested ground where these

intrareligious conflicts first played out included that of the shechita, or ritual butchering of animals according to religious dietary laws, or kashrut, concerning the suitability and preparation of foods.24 Like many nascent Jewish communities in the Midwest, Cincinnati’s early Jewish

congregations lacked religious authority figures to establish order and maintain congregational

decorum, i.e., a trained rabbi. As a result, certain important roles within the congregation were filled by lay members, such as the schochet (ritual slaughterer) who oversaw the slaughter of and

preparation of animals intended for human consumption and the hazan (reader/cantor) who led

Sabbath services among the members of the congregation. In larger communities elsewhere, the

hazan was usually subordinate to a rabbi within the structure of a congregation, but Cincinnati’s

early Jewish community was too small to attract the services of a rabbi during its first

generation.25 During that period, the community was held together by its members and the

tradition of generations. Many of the community’s elders were especially devout and particularly

fond of exerting the influence that accompanied their age and piety as they held sway within the

congregations.

23 Jonathan D. Sarna and Karla Goldman, “From Synagogue-Community to Citadel of Reform: The History of K.K. Bene Israel (Rockdale Temple) in Cincinnati Ohio,” in eds. James P. Wind and James W. Lewis, American Congregations, I: Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 161. 24 Karla Goldman, “In Search of an American Judaism: Rivalry and Reform in the Growth of Two Cincinnati Synagogues” in An Inventory of Promises: Essays on American Jewish History in Honor of Moses Rischin, eds. Jeffrey S. Gurock and Marc Lee Raphael (Carlson Publishers, 1995), 141. 25 Goldman, “In Search of an American Judaism,” 141-42. 211

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As a whole, Cincinnati Jews, “accepted the premise that Jewish communities were bound

to preserve Jewish law.”26 The facets of Jewish law upheld with fierce reverence by the early

Jewish community included kashrut, the supervision of a ritual bath, and the tradition of

members staying up all night to study on certain holidays. The result was that public worship

continued to remain traditional.27 The two hazans who led B’nai Israel and B’nai Jeshurun

received marginally civil respect for their efforts from their congregations. Hart Judah, hazan

and shochet, for B’nai Israel was accused, for example, of unbecoming behavior including

spending time in local saloons, playing cards, and slandering other shochets.28 Those who held

positions of authority within the lay communities often held the attitude: “do as I say, not as I

do.” That perspective meant that the voices of individual members of the congregation, and even groups of members, were overpowered by those of the hazan and his supporters among

congregational elders.29

The first rabbi brought in to lead a Cincinnati congregation was James K. Gutheim, hired

first by B’nai Israel and the following year by B’nai Jeshurun. Gutheim tried to institute a

modest number of reforms by prohibiting congregation members from certain disruptive

behaviors, and reforms within the liturgy, including reducing the number of traditional prayers.30

He was met with significant pushback from influential members of the congregation who seemed

to want a rabbi for the sake of appearance only, not for his contributions to the leadership and

learning of the congregation. The Rev. Gutheim did not last long in Cincinnati and within a few

26 Goldman, “The Path to Reform Judaism: An Examination of Religious Leadership in Cincinnati, 1841- 1855,” American Jewish History (March 2002), 37. 27 Goldman, “The Path to Reform,” 38. 28 Goldman, “The Path to Reform,” 38. 29 Goldman, “The Path to Reform,” 39-40. 30 Goldman, “The Path to Reform,” 39-40. 212

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years had returned east to embark on a noted rabbinical career in New York City.31 The next

rabbi recruited to lead a congregation in Cincinnati was Jacob Rosenfeld of Charleston, South

Carolina. His tenure was even shorter than that of Gutheim. Unfortunately, Rosenfeld’s gentle,

quiet nature meant that he was an easy target for bullying by the ultra-traditionalist members of

the community who overran the congregation, either out of a misguided sense of piety, or simply

because no one stood up to them.32 Unfortunately, these congregational battles were reported in

the pages of Jewish papers that had a national readership.33 Cincinnati’s Jewish community

began with a less than utopian reputation. Yet, the hardliners did not hold sway forever and as

they began to age, their influence diminished.

Fig. 22 - “Isaac Mayer Wise, 1880.”34

31 Goldman, “The Path to Reform,” 41-42. 32 Goldman, “The Path to Reform,” 42-44. 33 “Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, Cincinnati,” Occident (Apr. 1853), II:1 63-71, “Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, Cincinnati,” Occident (Jun. 1853), II:3, 162-168 quoted in Goldman, “The Path to Reform,” 45- 46. 34 “Isaac Mayer Wise,” 1880, American Jewish Archives and Goldman, “From Synagogue-Community to Citadel of Reform: The History of K. K. Bene Israel (Rockdale Temple) in Cincinnati, Ohio,” with Jonathan D. Sarna, in American Congregations, vol. 1, eds. James Lewis and James Wind (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 159-220. 213

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Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise became the third spiritual leader of the B’nai Jeshurun

congregation upon his arrival in Cincinnati in 1854. Wise brought Reform Judaism ideas with

him from Germany and he was the inspiration and motivation behind the American Reform

Movement, locating his spiritual and intellectual base in Cincinnati’s fertile religious ground.35

He eschewed overtly national and political facets of Jewish life, working instead to maximize

Judaism’s spirituality. He accomplished this through the introduction of “a male and female

synagogue choir and an organ [and] reordered the worship liturgy.” 36 More importantly, he

refused to pay attention or yield any ground “to the carping of Bene Israel traditionalists.”37

Fortunately, Wise’s arrival coincided with the natural maturing of the community. American

Jews in the Midwest who immigrated directly from European ghettos or recently emancipated

Jewish populations often experienced freedom of movement and socio-economic class mobility

for the first time. Early reactions to new freedoms ranged from timidity to test the limits of those

freedoms, to the ascendance of a few to be able to silence the majority of the members of their

community through a new hierarchy to which most were denied access.38

A few years after Wise’s arrival, and witnessing his elevation of B’nai Jeshurun above

the negative public reporting of previous squabbles between the two congregations, B’nai Israel attempted to enlist Wise to co-officiate both B’nai Israel and B’nai Jeshurun. B’nai Jeshurun declined to share their popular rabbi.39 Despite its lack of success in coopting Wise, B’nai

35 Goldman, “The Path to Reform,” 46-47. 36 Ibid., 47. 37 Ibid. 38 Zev Eleff, Who Rules the Synagogue? Religious Authority and the Formation of American Judaism (Oxford University Press, 2016), 72-77. 39 Bene Yeshurun Minutes, Nov. 25, 1854, Dec. 9, 1854 MS Collection 62, Box 3, American Jewish Archives quoted in Goldman, “In Search of an American Judaism,” 148. 214

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Israel’s proposal to the reform-minded Wise signaled that the influence of the “ultra-orthodox

men … the days of their greatness are gone, the people as a body do not pay much attention to

their quarrels.”40 Thus emboldened, the congregation of B’nai Israel again went looking for its own rabbi, but this time, one who could match the stature and strength of personality of Isaac

Mayer Wise, although with what they hoped was a less intense version of Wise’s reform agenda.41 The congregation successfully recruited Rabbi Max Lilienthal, but Lilienthal met Wise

step for step along the path of reform, in the synagogue and in faith. Ultimately, those who tried

to sabotage reforms from inside the congregation “were cowed into acquiescent silence.”42

Goldman adds nuance to earlier scholarship of Cincinnati’s mid-century Jewish community by assigning to rabbis Wise and Lilienthal “the intellectual and spiritual authority for what

Cincinnati Jews may have wanted to, but could not, do alone.43

Fig. 23 - “Max Lilienthal, n.d.”44

40 Ben Berith, “A Tour to the West,” Asmonean, Jan. 27, 1854, 118, quoted in Goldman, “In Search of American Judaism,” 148. 41 Goldman, “In Search of American Judaism,” 148-49. 42 Joseph Abraham to Isaac Leeser, Sep. 5, 1866 quoted in Goldman, “In Search of American Judaism,” 150. 43 Goldman, “The Path to Reform,” 37. 44 “Max Lilienthal,” n.d., Isaac Mayer Wise Digital Archive, American Jewish Archives. 215

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By taking this reformer’s path, both Wise and Lilienthal hoped to Americanize not only

Jewish immigrants, but Judaism itself. Wise had three goals: to unite the divided congregations

of Orthodox and Reform Judaism, to create a prayer book for services that honored a new

American tradition rather than relying on traditions from Germany or Poland, and to establish a

rabbinical training college.45 He was successful in achieving two of the three, and part of third.

Wise was the driving force behind the establishment of Hebrew Union College (1875) and the

Conference of American Rabbis (1889). He effectively promoted the adoption of a common

prayer book in English, Hebrew, and German.46

The item on Wise’s list of big ideas for American Reform Judaism that met with partial

success was the reconciliation of the Reform and Orthodox faith traditions. In that regard, He

was also the founder and publisher of the English-language newspaper The Israelite (later The

American Israelite) and the German-language newspaper Die Deborah that tried to bridge the gap between Reform and Orthodox communities. The attempt at reconciliation was put on hold during the U.S. Civil War and the early postwar Reconstruction Period. After several failed attempts before, and in the years immediately following the war, a significant number of Jewish leaders gathered in 1871 in Cleveland to discuss the unification movement. The meeting resulted in the passage of a resolution to create a conference and the foundation of an organization to be

known as the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC). As Wise argued, “We will

not lay down our pen until there shall stand firmly the Union of the American Hebrew

45 Goldman, “Public Faith and Private Virtue: Cincinnati’s American Israelites” in Mediating Modernity: Challenges and Trends in the Jewish Encounter with the Modern World, Essays in Honor of Michael A. Meyer, eds. Lauren B. Strauss and Michael Brenner (Wayne State University Press, 2008), 197. 46 Michael A. Meyer, “German-Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,” Toward Modernity (2017) 247-68 and Eleff, Who Rules the Synagogue?, 186. 216

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Congregations ….”47 Wise had navigated the minefield between competing sides for most of the

early postwar period with the goal of creating a conduit to standardize communications among

congregations and their leaders.

In 1885, Reform rabbi Kaufmann Kohler took the lead and called for a rabbinical

conference between the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the UAHC at Concordia

Hall in Allegheny City (before Allegheny City was annexed by Pittsburgh). The conference was

chaired by Isaac Mayer Wise. Although the platform which resulted from the conference was

never accorded formal acceptance by either of the organizations represented and “from the

beginning, leading Reform rabbis dissented from one or more of its major planks.”48 The UAHC

changed its name (it is now known as the Union for Reform Judaism) but not its focus in 2003. It

is still the congregational leg of Reform Judaism in the United States, complemented by the

Central Conference of American Rabbis and Hebrew Union College (HUC).

Arguably, the most significant of Wise’s accomplishments was the founding, funding, construction, and consecration of HUC. The United States was about to embark on its second century of nationhood when HUC became a reality, and “the first long-lasting American institution for rabbinical education.”49 Why Cincinnati? According to Goldman, “nineteenth- century Cincinnati Jews drew upon the cultural discourse of their era and locale to position themselves and their institutions as guarantors of American civilization.”50 The establishment of

the college in Cincinnati was not a fait accompli, as an early institutional attempt in Cincinnati

(Zion College) closed after only a few years. When Wise faced pushback from rabbis from the

47 Sefton Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism: The Life and Times of Isaac Mayer Wise (Oxford University Press, 1998), 240. 48 Jonathan D. Sarna, “New Light on the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885,” American Jewish History (1987), 76:3, 358. See the Pittsburgh section of this chapter for additional information on the 1885 Conference. 49 Goldman, “Public Faith and Private Virtue,” 195. 50 Ibid., 196. 217

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East who wanted to locate a rabbinical training college somewhere other than the Queen City, he defended his adopted hometown from the pages of The Israelite, in writing that Cincinnati was:

the successful hot-house for the tender plant of American Judaism. Here it has been nourished and cultivated with the greatest care and parental affection. This is the Zion of the New World, which sent forth that light and spirit of progressive, liberated and Americanized Judaism … There is a spirit of enlightened piety and unostentatious charity in this city, which is not so common that it might be found anywhere …. for with us Judaism is nothing outlandish, it is no exotic curiosity, it is neither German, French nor Polish, it is American, and fully so in language, spirit and form.51

To Goldman’s observations about Wise, I would add that early Cincinnati’s Jews were part of the group of pioneers who came in the early days of the city’s development to participate fully in the creation of the city’s shared institutions. They were successful in creating a home for the training of future rabbis in Cincinnati, rather than the expected location of New York City,

Boston, or Philadelphia, precisely because they were willing to take a leap of faith and proceed with the creation of HUC even, as Goldman observed, when funding seemed in doubt.52

The story of the Jewish community of Cincinnati was more than just that of the great men of American Reform Judaism including Drs. Wise and Lilienthal, and those who would follow in their footsteps including David Philipson, Louis Grossmann, and Abraham Lesser. It was also a story of the growing influence of American Jewish women within the community and eventually within the synagogue.53 Reforms within the synagogue included seating of women within the main sanctuary, previously restricted to men, rather than the traditional balcony seating where women observed but did not participate. Goldman argues that the presence of women in the

51 “The Location of the College,” The (American) Israelite (Cincinnati, Ohio), Fri., Aug. 14, 1874, 4. 52 Goldman, “Public Faith and Private Virtue,” 200-01. 53 Goldman, “The Public Religious Lives of Cincinnati’s Jewish Women” in Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives, eds. Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna (Brandeis University Press, 2001), 107. 218

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synagogue not only reformed the synagogue but the role of Jewish women within the faith.54 “In

this environment the community’s desire to stand forth as a leading and exemplary exponent of a respectable American religion intensified the pressure on Jewish women to find religious roles consistent with expectations they perceived as emerging from the American environment.”55

Early charitable efforts included those of the Ladies’ Hebrew Benevolent Society that tried,

albeit unsuccessfully, to collect funds for the establishment of an orphan asylum to care for

children who lost one or both parents to the city’s 1849 outbreak of cholera.56 The women of

both the B’nai Israel and B’nai Jeshurun congregations found community through this “group

identity and purpose,” mid-century, but public activism, nevertheless, stalled in Cincinnati

during this period.57

The care of widows and orphans created by the U.S. Civil War brought renewed attention

to women’s activism within the community. They were concerns that were mitigated during the

Progressive Era when religious goals were subsumed within larger social objectives. In fact, “the

history of American Jewish orphanages reveals much about the lives and philanthropic activity

of a cross-section of American Jewish women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries.”58 These efforts were the initial impetus that eventually led to the creation of the

IOBB’s Jewish Orphan Asylum in Cleveland discussed later in this chapter.59 Women,

nevertheless, continued to focus on worship-centered concerns even though they remain locked

outside the temple’s administrative roles.60 The National Council of Jewish Women was founded

54 Ibid., 107-108. 55 Ibid., 108. 56 Ibid., 111. 57 Ibid., 114. 58 Reena Sigman Friedman, “Founders, Teachers, Mothers, and Wards: Women’s Roles in American Jewish Orphanages, 1850-1925,” Shofar 15:2 (Winter 1997), 23. 59 Goldman, “The Public Religious Lives,” 112. 60 Ibid., 117. 219

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in 1893, coinciding with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jews from eastern Europe. In

many Jewish communities around the nation large enough to require an answer to the plight of

orphaned and abandoned children,

directors of Jewish child care institutions were drawn largely from the so-called ‘uptown,’ or more established German Jewish community. These communal leaders, concerned about the plight of growing numbers of Jewish children who were finding shelter in non-Jewish orphanages and fearful that such youngsters would become the victims of Christian missionary activity, joined in building child care institutions that would imbue children with a sense of Jewish identity.61

Such concerns about maintaining religious fidelity were present not only in the Jewish

community, but in Catholic and Protestant denominational communities as well. However, the sisterhoods of personal service, popular in other Jewish communities around the country were slow to find their footing in Cincinnati. Goldman observes, “Ironically, the historic and symbolic position of these Cincinnati congregations both retarded and advanced the progress of

Cincinnati’s Jewish women.”62 Perhaps because the focus had been centered around protection

of the new Reform tradition worship service, public activism was something that was not seen as

prudent or possible. As a force for activism, Jewish women of Cincinnati would find common

cause to step back into public roles in the future when the timing felt right. Yet, such group

hesitation did not prevent individual women from maintaining or undertaking roles in public

activism.

Cincinnati’s Jewish community was understandably proud of having established the

nation’s first Jewish Hospital in 1850 and the hospital has operated continuously since that time.

The most influential of Jewish charities in Cincinnati over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

however, was the local chapter of B’nai B’rith. IOBB Lodge No. 4 was established in Cincinnati

61 Friedman, “Founders, Teachers, Mothers, and Wards,” 23. 62 Goldman, “The Public Religious Lives,” 124. 220

24:11 in 1849 to tackle social issues that negatively impacted fellow Jews. Two smaller lodges in the area were founded within a decade. IOBB was not alone in its efforts, with nearly twenty Jewish charitable groups operating in Cincinnati before the start of the U.S. Civil War, including: the

Hebrew Beneficent Society, the Hebrew Benevolent Society, the Hebrew General Relief Fund, and four ladies associations that provided aid, shelter, and clothing to the poor, orphans, and widows. Members of the Cincinnati area’s IOBB lodges joined others in the region to establish the Jewish Orphan Asylum in Cleveland. While the nineteenth-century Cincinnati Jewish community might likely have supported a small Reform tradition asylum that cared for children from local Reform tradition families, these children were instead relocated to the Jewish Orphan

Asylum in Cleveland, where organizers believed that the positive benefits of a cohesive community of similarly affected children outweighed the potential downside of their geographic relocation. With Cincinnati’s role as the geographic and spiritual centers of Reform Judaism in

America, it is surprising that the orphanage was not also built in Cincinnati. However, two principal factors worked against that outcome: the fact that the IOBB’s national president at the time the JOA was organized, called Cleveland home and timing. The late 1860s were a time of intense behind-the-scenes efforts on behalf of the creation of HUC.

Julius Freiberg was born in Neu Leiningen in the Rhineland Palatinate in 1823 and immigrated to the United States in 1847, about the same time as Frank Herschede’s father

Johann. He settled first in northern Kentucky where he obtained work as a clerk at a general store. At that time, he also joined the congregation at K.K. B’nai Israel in downtown

Cincinnati.63 Trained in his native Germany as a Weinkűfer (wine cooper), he not only learned to craft the barrels, he also learned to clean and purify them after they had been emptied of their

63 Ibid. 221

24:11 contents, so that they could be reused, a skill and familiarity with the distilling process that would serve him well in the United States.64 Through his contact with customers at the general store, he secured additional work as a jobber, someone who wholesales to retailers the merchandise or commodities produced or grown by a third party. First, he successfully sold bales of wool for a Kentucky farmer named Hogan.65 Then Hogan agreed to let Julius keep the profits of sales he made disposing of five barrels of Hogan’s whisky and Julius quickly sold the whisky to hoteliers and restaurant and bar owners in Cincinnati.66 His reputation for forthright business dealings drew the attention of several Cincinnatians, including young merchant Levi Workum.

Fig. 24 - “Julius Freiberg and Levi Workum, ca. 1850s.”67

Julius and Levi were about the same age when they met. Both were single, successful, and each open to new opportunities. Julius’ breaks came in quick succession. First, on a personal level, Levi introduced Julius to his sister Duffie Workum, and they began to court. Second, on a business level, he came to the attention of J. A. Bowen, who had undertaken the construction of a

64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 5. 66 Ibid. 67 “Julius Freiberg and Levi Workum,” ca. 1850s. “Freiberg & Workum were ‘the Biggest Fish in a Very Large Pond,’” Sun., Feb. 25, 2015, https://pre- prowhiskeymen.blogspot.com/search?q=freiberg+%26+workum. 222

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whisky distillery in Lynchburg, Ohio, in rural Highland County, about sixty miles northeast of

Cincinnati. Bowen, running low on funds, had yet to complete the distillery facility and

commence operations. In essence, he wanted to sell the partially completed facility to someone

with deeper pockets. He offered the business, lock, stock, and yes, barrels, to Julius Freiberg and

offered to stay on as distillery superintendent, a role he filled for the rest of his life.68 In short

order, Freiberg had a business, a superintendent, and a willing partner as he reached out to his

friend, and future brother-in-law, Levi Workum, to join the business. It was not long before Levi closed the clothing store and distillers Freiberg & Workum (F&W) launched in 1856.

Fig. 25 - “Freiberg & Workum, Trade Advertisement, ca. 1870.”69

The new distilling partnership was a potent success. 70 As this trade advertisement from

around 1870 shows, F&W not only expanded the facility at Lynchburg, they purchased a second

location from the Boone County Distillery, in Petersburg, Kentucky across the Ohio River from

68 Ibid., 5a. 69 “Freiberg & Workum,” Trade Advertisement, ca. 1870. “Freiberg & Workum were ‘the Biggest Fish in a Very Large Pond,’” Sun., Feb. 25, 2015, https://pre- prowhiskeymen.blogspot.com/search?q=freiberg+%26+workum. 70 Marni Davis, Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (New York University Press, 2012), 28-30. 223

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Aurora, Indiana, just west of Cincinnati. The scene depicts the partners seated in a train dining

car being attended to by an African American waiter. Depicted in the wall basket above the

window are a coal scuttle and what appears to be a rifle case with the words “Wing Shot” in

large typeface, showcasing the use of that term to define an expert in hitting birds, or targets, in

flight. This is a possible reference to the partners’ ability to capitalize quickly on business

opportunity and of their customers to make a quick, sure profit by carrying the F&W products.

At least three of the distillery’s brands are shown (Kentucky Cabinet, Highland Pure Rye, and

Blakemore) in the image. At peak operations, the F&W distillery at Petersburg was producing

more than a million gallons of whisky a year, doubling the bourbon production of the nine

distilleries in famed Bourbon County, Kentucky.71 Not bad for a couple of businessmen who,

despite the inferences of the advertisement, abstained from consuming their own product.72 From

their triumphant partnership, the brothers-in-law used their success and influence to positively impact the lives of fellow Cincinnatians.

Fig. 26 - “Duffie Workum Freiberg, n.d.”73

71 In order for a liquor to be classified as bourbon, it has to contain corn as the dominant grain (at least 51%) and be aged in new oak barrels for at least four years. Whisky has no such restrictions on barrel age or minimum aging. 72 Freiberg, 5. 73 “Duffie Workum Freiberg,” n.d. in Sarna and Klein, 65. 224

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Duffie Workum Freiberg was known as “Aunt Duffie” to members of Cincinnati’s

Jewish community. 74 She was involved in several charitable activities in Cincinnati including membership in various ladies’ auxiliary associations in addition to her responsibilities within her own family. The photograph above shows her as a young woman, perhaps in her teaching days or after shortly her marriage to Julius Freiberg. Duffie’s parents, Jacob Workum and Sarah

(Levy) Workum, immigrated as an engaged couple, to the United States from Amsterdam around

1820. They married upon arriving in New York and soon moved on to New Orleans where a small community of Jews had already been established.75 Ultimately, the Crescent City held little long-term appeal for the newlyweds, and they moved with their infant son, Levi, to Cincinnati in

1823.76 Duffie, their second child, was born in Cincinnati in 1833, reportedly the first Jewish child born west of the Allegheny Mountains.77 Life in Cincinnati was good for the Workums.

They were prosperous and their children became successful adults. Levi owned a clothing store downtown and Duffie became a public school teacher after graduation from teacher’s college.78

She married Julius Freiberg in 1856 and their family grew to include six children.

74 The derivation of “Duffie,” is not known, although the family historian Albert Freiberg believed it was taken from the German word Taubschen or little dove. Little dove became “dovie” or Duffie. Albert H. Freiberg, II, “About the Freiberg Family,” Freiberg Family Collection, AR11429, Leo Baeck Institute Center for Jewish History, New York, Digital Collection, 5. 75 Ibid, 4. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 5. 78 Freiberg, 3. 225

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Fig. 27 - “Jewish Foster Home, ca. 1910.”79

Duffie was involved in family and community matters but her most significant charitable efforts involved the founding of the Jewish Foster Home (JFH) on the city’s west side. She founded the JFH in 1892 and remained its president until her death. The staff cared for a number of children in a daycare setting, while others, infants and children who were half- and full- orphans, or who had been abandoned by their parent(s), were housed around the clock. Unlike many contemporary institutions, the JFH was not a child-saving facility with a stern, imposing brick edifice. As the photo above shows, it was instead a large, Victorian-style home with a wraparound porch and broad front steps, numerous windows, and a three-story turret. It sat on a wooded hillside near the corner of Rapid Run Road and Glenway Avenue and across the street from fifty-acre Lick Run Park.80 The original intent of Duffie and other organizers was for the

JFH to provide proper daycare to children whose mothers had to work in order to support their families. Over time, that mission expanded to include those children within the Jewish community who were orphaned or abandoned. Eventually, orphaned infants and very young

79 “Jewish Foster Home,” ca. 1910. See also Sarna and Klein, 65-67. 80 Now Rapid Run Park. 226

24:11 children were cared for at the JFH until they reached the age of five or six, at which point they were usually, but not always, sent to the JOA in Cleveland.81 Despite the charitable nature of the

JFH’s mission, newspaper coverage was limited to public notification of meeting minute summaries vis-à-vis “Secretary’s Reports,” and notices of donations received.82 Duffie Workum

Freiberg and her husband Julius had deep ties to the local IOBB lodge and to the JOA, not only through Julius’ IOBB membership but also through financial support of the JOA and membership on its various committees and in the ladies’ auxiliary.83 Duffie died in May of 1903 and Julius in December of 1905. The JFH remained in operation until the early 1920s.

The following obituary that marked the December 1905 passing of Julius Freiberg verges on the hagiographic, yet its author had little to gain by effusively inflating Freiberg’s attributes.

George Washburne, writer and publisher of The Wine and Spirits Bulletin, a trade magazine published in Louisville between 1897 and 1918 wrote:

Mr. Freiberg has left a strong and wholesome imprint on the commercial life in Cincinnati. He rendered great service to the city as a member of the sinking fund. So highly esteemed was he that he was made an honorary member of the Chamber of Commerce. He was potent in counsel for the Order of B’nai B’rith. For near a quarter of a century he was president of the Mound Street Temple. He was long president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. He was a vice-president of the Board of Governors of Hebrew Union College and a member of the Phoenix and other clubs. Mr. Freiburg, for many years, had been a director of the Jewish Hospital of Cincinnati. His endowment of $25,000 of the surgical pavilion gave that institution one of the finest operating rooms in the United States. He was the most generous giver to this hospital.84

81 See note 20 above. 82 “Jewish Foster Home, Secretary’s Monthly Report,” The American Israelite (Cincinnati, Ohio), Thu., Aug. 25, 1892, 6; “Jewish Foster Home, President’s Comments,” The American Israelite (Cincinnati, Ohio), Thu., Oct. 15, 1894, n.p.; “The Jewish Foster Home,” The American Israelite (Cincinnati, Ohio), Thu., Dec. 27, 1894, 6; and “The Jewish Foster Home, Secretary’s Report,” The American Israelite (Cincinnati, Ohio), Thu., Jan. 10, 1895, 6. 83 B’nai B’rith District No. 2 Records (1904-1976), MS-36, American Jewish Archives. 84 “Necrology: Julius Freiberg,” The Wine and Spirit Bulletin (Louisville, Kentucky), 1920, 20, 22. 227

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Clearly, Julius Freiberg made a positive impact on his adopted hometown, not only with Jewish causes, but also within the city’s business community. Nevertheless, it is the final paragraph of the obituary which marks Freiberg as having been a mentor and a gentleman. While it employs the style of its time and place, in the present day, it reads as immoderate:

Mr. Freiberg’s death will arouse deep feeling in the hearts of many members of the trade. Strongly outlined in his nature was the idea of giving assistance to young men in the early stages of their career. Sometimes this assistance would take a financial form, and sometimes it would be of that definite sympathy and moral backing which would assist in overcoming the discouragements of youth. The writer has a vivid recollection of an incident along these lines which occurred some twenty years ago in his own experience and as a result of which he has ever held Mr. Freiberg in the highest esteem, and shall ever venerate his memory.85

Despite a current essence of superfluidity, this was a heartfelt tribute in its day to a role model, a man who had touched many lives with his generosity of spirit and support. The Freibergs’ sons and nephews (Levi Workum’s sons) took over the management of F&W in 1900, but F&W

Distillers did not survive Prohibition.

Cincinnati was also home to a cohesive Orthodox Jewish community, members of which included the Manischewitz family, Jewish Lithuanian immigrants who came to national prominence in their new hometown in the late nineteenth century. The family patriarch was

Orthodox Rabbi Dov Behr Manischewitz. He and his family began baking matzo to sell to the

Cincinnati Jewish community in 1885. The Manischewitz brand quickly became popular in

Jewish communities throughout the United States and also gained an international following.

The image below depicts the turn-of-the-century packaging of the Manischewitz’s most familiar product that supported the family and their charitable efforts. Manischewitz’s matzos were the first to adopt the now-familiar rectangular shape. The uniformity was made possible by modern manufacturing processes that replaced the tradition of hand-cutting the matzo that bakers had

85 Ibid. 228

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followed for millennia. The packaging also asserts a claim that because they were manufactured

using such modern processes, they were “sanitary and … guaranteed to be STRICTLY KOSHER

for Passover.”86 While clearly communicating the benefits of the product to Jewish consumers,

the packaging also respects its American manufacture. The text on the front of the package is in

English and it matches its contemporary packaged food competitors in style.87 This was meant to

confer the idea that modernity nevertheless continued to respect tradition.

Fig. 28 - "Manischewitz's Matzos, ca. 1900.”88

Son Hirsch, one of eight Manischewitz children, became an Orthodox rabbi like his

father. He was educated in Palestine, which underscores the extent to which Cincinnati, despite

its reputation for self-insulation and withdrawal, was far from isolated. The city supported a

diverse Jewish community, and fanned the desires among traditional American Jews to compete

with Reform Jews as sources of authority and legitimacy. This reflected a voluntary association

of members of the Orthodox Jewish community to exercise their influence on equal footing with

86 See note 21. 87 “Food and Beverage Retailing in 19th and Early 20th Century America,” Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, University of Michigan, https://www. https://www.lib.umich.edu/janice-bluestein- longone-culinary-archive/food-and-beverage-retailing-19th-and-early-20th-century. 88 Yvette Alt Miller, “Rabbi Manischewitz and His Iconic Company,” The Jewish Voice, Aug. 21, 2019, http://thejewishvoice.com/2019/08/rabbi-manischewitz-and-his-iconic-company/. The company remained under family control until 1990 when it was sold to Kohlberg & Co. 229

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the Reform community that tended to overshadow other Jewish traditions in Cincinnati. Hirsch

returned to Cincinnati in 1914 upon the death of his father to help his brothers run the family

baking firm.89 He was covered by the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1919 for his attendance at the

Mizrachi organization convention held in New York City that year.90 Mizrachi is another name

for the Religious Zionists of America movement, a group of mostly Orthodox American Jews

who support the goals of “The Land of Israel, for the People of Israel, According to the Torah of

Israel.”91 The American branch was formed in Cincinnati at a national convention held in the

city in 1914, overseen by Rabbi Meir Berlin (Bar-Ilan). In addition to his ties to multiple charitable institutions in Europe and Palestine, Hirsch also founded Cincinnati’s Orthodox

Jewish Orphan’s Home (OJOH) in 1914 and served as its president until 1931 when he left

Cincinnati and the family firm to lead Congregation Ohab Zedek in New York. 92

89 For additional history on the Manischewitz legacy, see Laura Manischewitz Alpern, Manischewitz: The Matzo Family—The Making of an American Jewish Icon (KTAV Publishing House, 2008) 35-81 and Sarna, “How Matzoh Became Square: Manischewitz and the Development of Machine-Made Matzah in the United States,” Lecture, Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies, https://www.brandeis.edu/hornstein/sarna/americanjewishcultureandscholarship/Archive/HowMatzahBec ameSquare.pdf, 1-24. 90 “At Mizrachi Convention,” Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), Mon., May 26, 1919, 8. 91 Yosef Salmon, “The Mizrachi Movement in America: A Belated by Sturdy Offshoot,” Journal of the American Jewish Archives (1996), 161-175, http://americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/1996_48_02_00_salmon.pdf. 92 Orthodox Jewish Orphan’s Home (Cincinnati, Ohio) Records. 1922-1924, MS-67, American Jewish Archives. 230

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Fig. 29 – “(Orthodox) Jewish Home and Hospital Buildings.”93

The OJOH, situated in the clustered setting shown in the image above, was founded to

shelter full- and half-orphans from Orthodox Jewish families. These orphans were intentionally kept close to the community into which they had been born. The homogeneity of the smaller

Orthodox community bolstered the idea of keeping children of Orthodox families in close proximity to one another, and to the communities where they were born, to support their

Orthodox faith tradition. This was a factor in determining that the OJOH be built close to other

Orthodox Jewish institutions including the home for elderly Orthodox community members. The

OJOH’s facility was among several buildings located in a campus-like setting in Cincinnati’s

Avondale neighborhood that also included the Orthodox Jewish Home for the Aged and the

Jewish Hospital.94 This practice had the intention of bringing Orthodox children into daily

contact with Orthodox professionals and elders, each supporting the importance of maintaining

Orthodox traditions.

93 “Jewish Home and Hospital Buildings, Avondale, Cincinnati,” (n.d.), www.CincinnatiMemoryProject.org, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. 94 Orthodox Jewish Orphans Home (Cincinnati, Ohio) Records. 1922-1924, MS-67, American Jewish Archives. 231

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Fig. 30 - “Ferdinand Westheimer & Sons, Distillers, (Letterhead), ca. 1904.”95

Another Cincinnati distillery family, the Westheimers, also had ties to charitable efforts

on behalf the city’s dependent children. Twenty-four year old Irvin F. Westheimer and two of his older brothers, Morris and Leo, were dispatched to Cincinnati in 1903 by their father Ferdinand, from their home in St. Joseph, Missouri, to take over the new operations of the “Eastern Offices” of Westheimer & Sons Distillers (W&S). W&S distilled and bottled more than a dozen brands of whiskies, ryes, and bourbons, but their best seller was a brand named “Red Top Rye.”

Institutional legend tells us that Irvin was on his way into the office one morning and spotted a young boy with his dog poking through the trash outside the distillery.96 They struck up a

conversation and Irvin took young “Tom,” whose widowed mother worked to provide for him

and his three siblings, under his wing, providing him with mentorship that the fatherless boy

would otherwise have gone without. Irvin Westheimer, who Tom referred to as “big brother,”

95 “Ferdinand Westheimer & Sons, Distillers,” Letterhead, ca. 1904 from “Ferd Westheimer Spun the Red Top – and Won,” Those Pre-Pro Whiskey Men, May 30, 2014. http://www. http://pre- prowhiskeymen.blogspot.com/2014/05/ferd-westheimer-spun-red-top-and-won.html. 96 Sarah E. O. Schwartz and Jean E. Rhodes, “From Treatment to Empowerment: New Approaches to Youth Mentoring,” American Journal of Community Psychology (2016) 58:1-2, 150-157. 232

24:11 reached out to other professional men in the Cincinnati community and asked them to join him in mentoring fatherless boys, to share guidance and emotional support. The efforts of Irvin

Westheimer in Cincinnati eventually went national, providing the impetus for the founding of the

Big Brother movement.97

The United Jewish Social Agencies of Cincinnati, originally the United Jewish Charities, and now Jewish Family Service, was founded in 1896 and one of the first such Jewish charitable umbrella organizations in the nation, bringing eight charitable agencies under one roof. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it oversaw operation of the Convalescent and

Foster Home. Records pertaining to its oversight are limited to the years 1924 and 1925 and deal primarily with recreational activities for the children and the health status of the home’s convalescent adults.98 Ultimately, Cincinnati was a community scaffolded by the faiths of its citizens and their families. At times, this read as narrow-minded and parochial, as it did in the mid-nineteenth century with the violent anti-Catholic rhetoric of the Know Nothings. Yet at other times, this idea of faith communities was exemplified by individual efforts of those such as

Rabbi Hirsch Manischewitz, Julius and Duffie Freiberg, and Irv Westheimer. Although they did not replicate the method the Herschedes employed in their outreach to children from the St.

Aloysius orphanage, the efforts of Cincinnati’s Jewish community were nonetheless broad, deep, and impactful. They reflected a powerful commitment to faith, family, and humanity, all connected through the concepts of tzedakah, and modern American philanthropy.

The Manischewitz family’s origins in Lithuania stood outside the majority German-

Jewish immigration to Cincinnati, yet their family fit with the charitable zeitgeist of Cincinnati in

97 Big Brothers/Big Sisters Association of Cincinnati Records (1913-2010), MS-852, American Jewish Archives. 98 United Jewish Social Agencies (Cincinnati, Ohio), MS-366, American Jewish Archives. 233

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the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hirsch Manischewitz’s commitment to the

Orthodox community of Cincinnati and its dependent children was matched by his family’s

commitment to the to the eastern European Jewish refugees in Palestine. The Freiberg’s efforts

on behalf of Reform and Conservative Jewish children through the establishment of the JFH and

their support of the IOBB mission in general and the JOA in particular, are indicative of their profound benevolence. Cleveland’s Jewish community was also home to a significant contingent of American Jewish philanthropists and its diversity of ethnic background became a strength that

would prove beneficial to a created family of orphans.

Cleveland

Five year old (sic) Bennie Antin lay in bed. He lay in one of an endless number of beds, each filled with a restless little body. For him and all of the other boys the summer day was over. The towering white walls of the huge dormitory had lost their glow to the setting dusk. Yet the window shades could not shut out the western sun, and the babble of children at play still rose from the yard below. These were neighboring children who lived with their fathers and mothers. A fence separated them from Bennie and his like who lived at the orphanage.99

Jacob (Jack) Girick spent much of his adolescence, and eventually a part of his

professional career, in Cleveland’s Jewish Orphan Asylum (JOA). He, and older sisters Jenny

and Mae, were born in Indiana to Russian immigrants Fanny (Marcus) Girick and her husband

Isaac. Isaac died in early 1900 and the children were admitted to the JOA in 1902 when Jenny

was nine, Mae was eight, and Jack was six. When Fanny died of tuberculosis in September of the

following year, she knew that her children were safe.100 Dr. Samuel Wolfenstein, the

99 Jack Girick, He Once Lived in a House (unpublished manuscript, ca. 1930-1949), 1. Mss 4583, Jack Girick Papers, WRHS, 5. 100 Census records show that Fanny was widowed by the time of the 1900 Census and worked in ladies’ garment manufacturing. Jack, Jenny, and Mae lived with her in Indianapolis’ 15th ward. “1900 United States Federal Census for Joe (Jack) Girick,” Ancestry.com. Year: 1900; Census Place: Indianapolis, Marion, Indiana; Roll: 391; Page: 3A; Enumeration District: 0178; FHL microfilm: 1240391. Ancestry.com. 1900 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com; 234

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superintendent of the JOA when Jack and his sisters resided at the institution, saw in the boy “a

lad with much promise ... he served as a monitor, assisted the superintendent in conducting

Sabbath religious services, and was elected president of the Jewish Orphans’ Literary Union and

the Athletic Association.”101 Jack stood out in an orphanage that was home to as many as 500

children at one time. He graduated from Cleveland’s Central High School and in 1916 was sent

by the JOA’s trustees to attend HUC in Cincinnati to study for the rabbinate, but his time in

Cincinnati was brief. Girick did not complete his rabbinical training and returned instead to the

JOA.102 Upon his return, he was hired by the orphanage as a governor (a staff position equivalent

to that of a governess) and in 1922 was promoted to assistant superintendent.103 He remained in

that role at the orphanage until 1938 and witnessed many of the institution’s trials, triumphs, and

transformations.

Two things about Jack’s story are striking. First, he reached a level of institutional

recognition not typically achieved by other orphan children. I have noted the instances of

Catholic orphans singled out by priests or nuns for religious training. Those children went on to

lives of service within the church and even within the institutions in which they were raised. Jack

was among this similar small coterie of orphans to be rewarded for his intellect, work ethic, and

commitment, sent first to public high school and then on to Hebrew Union College. Second, and

and “Fanny Girick: Indiana, Works Progress Administration Death Index,” Ancestry.com. Indiana, WPA Death Index, 1882-1920 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com. 101 Samuel Wolfenstein, quoted in Gary Edward Polster, Inside Looking Out: The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, 1868-1924 (The Kent State University Press, 1990), 173-74. 102 Jewish Orphan Home Alumni Association Bulletin (1982), 3. 103 Ibid. By the 1940 Census, 43-year old Jack was living in Brooklyn, New York with his sister Mae Goldman, her husband, children, and a housekeeper. The census enumerator listed Jack’s occupation as “writer-fiction,” although there is no record that he ever published under his own name. By the time he registered for the draft in 1942, he was living with his sister Jenny Peipert and her husband in Sheepshead, Brooklyn. Apart from the telephone interview he gave Polster in 1986, Jack Girick essentially vanished from the public record until his death in 1988 at the age of 92. 235

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more importantly, Jack and his sisters were placed in an orphanage that was more than 300 miles

from their home.

Cleveland’s Jewish community was established within twenty years of that of the Jewish

community in Cincinnati, yet it grew to eclipse its neighbor to the south to become one of the

largest in the nation. Like the Workums, Dr. Daniel Levi Maduro Peixotto emigrated from

Amsterdam to the United States as a child when his family settled in New York in 1807. He was

the first Jewish settler in Cleveland in 1836, when he relocated to become a member of the

faculty of the Willoughby Medical College, now part of Case Western Reserve University.

Peixotto left behind a successful medical career in New York where he had been a founding

member of the New York Academy of Medicine and an editor of the New York Medical and

Physical Journal. 104 Within a year of his arrival in Cleveland, he was joined by fur trader

Simpson (Simson) Thorman, the first among a group of twenty Jews who came to the city over

the following three years from the Bavarian town of Unsleben.

The transplanted community from Unsleben brought with them “an ethical will written

by the Unsleben religious teacher Lazarus Kohn … that warned, ‘Do not turn away from the

religion of our fathers … Don’t tear yourselves away from the laws in which your fathers and

mothers searched for assurance and found it.”105 Kohn’s warning foreshadowed the observations of Greenberg a century later that American Jews would be tested in their resolve to retain their

Jewishness. With Peixotto, this group from Unsleben formed the Israelite Society, Cleveland’s

104 Ibid. 105 Sally H. Wertheim and Alan D. Bennett, eds. Remembering Cleveland’s Jewish Voices (Kent State University Press, 2011), 196 quoted in Ira Robinson, “‘A Link in the Great American Chain’: The Evolution of Jewish Orthodoxy in Cleveland to 1940,” in eds. Sean Martin and John J. Grabowski, Cleveland Jews and the Making of a Midwestern Community (Rutgers University Press, 2020), 14. 236

24:11 first Jewish congregation.106 Two years later, however, the congregation split over doctrinal disagreements and the Anshe Chesed congregation was formed to provide spiritual services to those who left the Israelite Society.

Despite the internal stresses exacerbated by rapid growth, the Jewish community came together to found organizations that cared for the most vulnerable among its coreligionists. Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, when Cleveland’s Jewish population stood at approximately

1,000 individuals, some of its most prominent members established a local chapter of IOBB, the

Hebrew Benevolent Society, and the Jewish Ladies Benevolent Society, among others. The outcry for charitable initiatives kept pace with the community’s growth which reached 3,500 individuals by 1880. These organizations continued to mobilize after 1890 when the size of the

Jewish community of Cleveland spiked on the heels of the arrival of thousands of Jews fleeing the oppressive pogroms of eastern European governments.

By 1907, the Jewish population of Cleveland reached 20,000, having almost doubled within a decade.107 In the 1920s, the population hovered around 100,000, making Cleveland the largest community of Jewish immigrants and their descendants in Ohio, and one of the largest in the nation during the period.108 This surge of new residents also helped Cleveland become the fifth largest city in the United States. Jews who immigrated from eastern Europe during the opening decades of the twentieth century were overwhelmingly followers in the Orthodox tradition. They established small benevolent institutions of their own in Cleveland, including a home for the aged and an orphan asylum, as they had in Cincinnati.109 The Orthodox Jewish

106 Cyrus Adler and Samuel Wolfenstein, “Cleveland,” Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), JewishEncyclopedia.com, http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/4420-cleveland. Samuel Wolfenstein was Superintendent of the JOA from 1878 to 1913 and Simon Peiser replaced him in 1913. 107 See Table 2. 108 Gartner, 101-102. 109 Ibid., 113-14. 237

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Children’s Home (OJCH) was founded in 1919 and opened in 1920 as an alternative to the JOA.

Its founders wanted a place to raise Orthodox children with the spirit of Orthodox Judaism and to

place orphans with Orthodox families.110 The Federation of Jewish Charities chose to fund the

OJCH, ostensibly because the JOA already had widespread financial support and few critical

issues with fundraising going forward. Problems with disorganization and findings of poor care

led to the OJCH’s license being revoked in the fall of 1932, although it was reinstated a year

later.111 In contrast, the Reform tradition JOA, founded by descendants of the region’s earliest

Jewish settlers, had a long and hopeful history of transcending challenges of all sorts to provide

assistance to Jewish children from Reform and Conservative tradition families. It drew financial

support, and orphans, from throughout the significant geographic region that represented IOBB

Grand Districts 2, 5, and 7 at the time, and was able to capitalize on the ability to adapt to

changes within that community. This ability to adapt benefitted the JOA and the wider Reform

community by allowing it to change course when exigent circumstances required, as state and

federal regulations on care and reporting became more demanding.

Dr. Peixotto’s son Benjamin Franklin (B.F.) Peixotto was a man of vision. A lawyer by

training, the younger Peixotto capitalized on the discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania in the

1860s and joined with other prominent Jewish investors in the Cherry Valley Oil Company.112

He founded a Sunday School at the Tifereth congregation, motivated in part by Isaac Mayer

Wise who noted that “without a school, Judaism has but a gloomy future.”113 He spent time on the editorial board of the Plain Dealer, but in the mid-nineteenth century, was a prime mover among the Jewish population of Cleveland to find solutions to social welfare problems within the

110 Crenson, 105-106. 111 Ibid. 112 Gartner, 21. 113 Isaac Mayer Wise, quoted in The Israelite (Cincinnati, Ohio), Aug. 20, 1858 quoted in Gartner, 54. 238

24:11 community. Among his efforts at organized social charity was the founding of the Hebrew

Benevolent Association in 1855 along with George A. Davis and the founding of IOBB’s first

Cleveland lodge, Solomon Lodge No. 16, in 1858. Peixotto, Dr. James Horowitz, Abraham

Wiener, and Simpson Thorman provided the impetus to bring the brotherhood of the covenant to

Cleveland. The goals of the members of Cleveland’s first IOBB lodge mirrored those of the larger organization, to connect “persons of the Jewish faith in the work of promoting their highest interests and those of humanity ... [including] providing for, protecting, and assisting the widow and orphan.”114

In 1863, Peixotto was not quite thirty years old, nevertheless, he was elected to a four- year term as president of IOBB’s national office.115 The U.S. Civil War weighed heavily on all

Americans at the time, Christians and Jews alike. Over the course of the war, more than 10,000

Jews served, many of them in German-immigrant infantry battalions, seven thousand on the side of the Union and the rest among the forces of the Confederacy. Five hundred made the ultimate sacrifice for their families and cause. Those children who were orphaned as a result of the war’s devastation were a primary inspiration for Peixotto and the IOBB membership. As IOBB president (and representative of the Solomon Lodge), Peixotto was scheduled to attend the 1863 meeting of Grand Lodge District 2 (IOBB’s western division) in St. Louis, Missouri to discuss

114 Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. “B’nai B’rith” cited in Polster, 4. He left Cleveland in the late 1860s and was appointed as American Consul to Romania in 1870 by President Grant, and as American Consult to Lyon, France in 1877 by President Hayes. He returned to the United States and ran for political office in New York, but was blackballed in 1889 by both the “Ohio Society of New York and the New York Republican Club … as reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: ‘the fact that he is a Hebrew tells against him with his Republican fellows.’ Yet it should be noted that at least in politics the existence of [antisemitism] was furtive and tinged with guilt.” Gartner, 54 (quoting Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), Dec. 13, 1889, n.p. 115 For a discussion of Peixotto’s post-IOBB career, see Eli Lederhendler, “Shtadlanut and Stewardship: Paternal Diplomacy and Leadership in American Jewry, 1860s to 1920s,” Jewish Culture and History, 19:1 (2018), 97-110. 239

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how to assist war orphans and other matters but, as remarks from the fiftieth anniversary of the

JOAs founding testify:

It was in the darkest days of the Civil War, when Ohio and Indiana were being invaded by a rebel force of cavalry under the command of General [John Hunt] Morgan, when railroad communications with St. Louis had been destroyed, and the annual meeting of Grand Lodge No. 2, which was to have been held in that city in July, 1863, was on that account held in Cleveland, that the 12 lodges of the district having a total membership of less than a thousand, through their assembled representatives, took the first steps looking to the erection of what in the course of time has grown and developed into one of the leading orphan homes in the world.”116

At this meeting of the representatives held in Cleveland, a committee on “Benevolent

Institutions” determined that $10,000 was sufficient to purchase land and erect buildings to

house a Jewish orphanage in St. Louis. It was also decided that the members of District No. 2

pay a $1.00 capitation tax (assessed at twenty-five cents each quarter) to raise the necessary money.117 Initial funding took four years to complete, but members were unable to agree on a

location in St. Louis. With a revised mandate to build the orphanage where lodge leadership thought best, a site was eventually selected in Cleveland that once housed Dr. Thomas Seeley’s water sanitorium. During its years in operation, the sanitorium had provided Clevelanders and

visitors access to hydropathic water cures popular during the mid-nineteenth century. The

building, shown in the photograph below, was refurnished for the care of orphans, and thirty-

eight children were among the first residents.118 Over the course of its operations, the JOA of

116 Keeping the speaker’s effusive praise at the JOA’s fiftieth anniversary in perspective, the JOA became a refuge for orphaned Jewish children from Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. “Address, Judge Philip Stein,” Report of Exercises in Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Jewish Orphan Asylum, Districts Nos. 2 and 6, International Order of B’nai B’rith at Cleveland, Ohio, on Sunday, July 14, 1918,” 5, Box 2, MS 68, Jewish Orphan Asylum (Shaker Heights, Ohio) Records, the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. 117 A capitation tax is a head tax paid on each IOBB member. 118 Ibid., 7; and “Address, Hon. Abraham Wiener,” Report of Exercises in Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary, 14, Box 2, MS 68, Jewish Orphan Asylum (Shaker Heights, Ohio) Records, AJA. 240

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Cleveland accepted orphans from more than fourteen states that were part of the organization’s

District Nos. 2, 5, and 7 and offered them a safe environment in which to reach maturity.

Fig. 31 – “Jewish Orphan Asylum, ca. 1900.”119

The facility was dedicated on July 14, 1868 and celebrated with “a parade including flags, floats, bands, and civic dignitaries and B’nai B’rith officers marched to the grounds … the entrance was covered with a white canvas festooned with leaves” that read:

Seid gegrusst! Vater und Mutter den Weisen sein, Bringst der Liebe lehnend Streben, Selbst ein rechter Mensch zu sein, Und der Menschlichkeit zu lieben.

(Greetings! Be mother and father to the orphan Striving to bring love To be a just man oneself And to love humanity.)120

119 “Jewish Orphan Asylum,” Cleveland Memory Project, http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/general/id/61/rec/2. 120 Gartner, 59. 241

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This was a day for celebration and public acknowledgement of a significant achievement of the

Jewish members of the community. The JOA would be held up as a model of modern mid-

century orphan care. It would have its challenges in the coming decades but its victories as well.

The JOA establishment in Cleveland was an opportunity for the German Jews of the city

to highlight their arrival as full members of a citizenry that was successful enough to not have to

rely on the largesse of the dominant Christian population for the care of its most vulnerable co-

religionists:

the JOA was initially an expression of the Cleveland German-Jewish community’s desire to symbolize their rise to power, authority, and respectability … Proud of their rapid emergence and accomplishments in American society, they attempted to gain the acceptance of the Christian community demonstrating to them that they indeed were Americans first and foremost ... to gain acceptance ... by building an orphanage and caring for their own needy and dependent children ... A Jewish orphan asylum would signal the Gentiles that the immigrant German Jewish community was wealthy and responsible enough to take care of its own.121

The JOA’s Board of Trustees was comprised of successful German Jewish businessmen from

across the Grand Lodge No. 2 membership. It was not just a reflection of Cleveland’s Jewish

community but one of a broader geographical area with trustees from cities such as Columbus,

Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Louisville, among others. These men turned to a fellow

German Jew and accomplished teacher to administer the JOA in its early years.

The original superintendent of the JOA was Louis Aufrecht, a language teacher who had

most recently lived and worked in Cincinnati. His wife, Rosa, was the JOA’s first matron.

Aufrecht was born in Prussia in 1832 and immigrated to the United States in 1857, living first in

New York, then Louisville, and then Cincinnati. The Aufrechts were hired by the JOA’s Board

of Trustees in July of 1868 and were ready to greet the first group of children in September of

121 Polster, “‘To Love Work and Dislike Being Idle’: Origins and Aims of the Cleveland Orphan Asylum, 1868-1878,” Journal of the American Jewish Archives, 39:2, Nov. 1987, 129. 242

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that year. The orphanage was soon overflowing with orphans, more than they were initially able

to accommodate or successfully supervise. A new dormitory wing was quickly added and by the

end of its first year in operation, more than one hundred children were in residence. There were

staff members (governors, governesses, attendants, cooks, etc.) on hand, but the principal

responsibility for the daily operation of the JOA fell on the shoulders of the Aufrechts. Louis

Aufrecht had been a respected language teacher in Cincinnati but imposed “military-style

discipline” on the children, especially the boys, who behaved in Aufrecht’s presence and

continued “to do as they pleased” when his back was turned – in other words – they were typical

children.122 Endemic staff turnover and an ever-increasing population of children, with hundreds of children in residence in 1878, contributed to the Aufrechts’ exhaustion: “Owing to ill health,

and after most earnest, efficient and devoted service, Mr. and Mrs. Aufrecht resigned after ten

years.”123 They returned to Cincinnati and Louis became a language instructor at HUC, where he

died at the age of 49 in 1882.

His successor was Dr. Samuel Wolfenstein, a JOA trustee since 1875, and the rabbi of St.

Louis’ Congregation B’nai El. Wolfenstein took charge of the orphanage in 1878. His wife

Bertha was hired as the matron and they raised their six children, ages two to thirteen, in their quarters at the JOA. By the 1880 Census, there were approximately 250 children in residence at the JOA. Like the Catholics and Protestants who operated orphanages for children from their own communities, the JOA was often at the mercy of downturns in the economy. The fact that the JOA counted on donations from a significantly larger geographic area was offset by the fact that the number of Jews in these distant communities was sometimes quite small. Nevertheless,

122 Lucia Johnson Bing, Social Work in Greater Cleveland (Welfare Federation of Cleveland, 1938), 60- 63. 123 “Wiener,” Report of Exercises in Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary, 14. 243

24:11 the JOA benefitted from orphan fairs held in cities such as Cincinnati where: “without regard to sect, religion, or race, has united its people in getting ready for this grandest Fair ever know (sic) in local history. There are now two hundred eight-six (sic) orphans in the Jewish Orphan Asylum at Cleveland—more than the institute can well take care of on account of its too meager accommodations.”124 Tens of thousands of dollars were raised over the course of the ten-day orphan fair in Cincinnati making it one of the most successful events in support of the JOA. The funds went toward building additional accommodations at the Woodland Avenue location.

Wolfenstein initially tried to be less of a disciplinarian toward the children of the JOA, but “by the 1890s a regimented military tone in fact pervaded.”125 The population more than doubled before the turn of the twentieth century and the 500 children housed in a single, albeit larger, location required loving but firm discipline in order for the JOA to have any hope of turning out children who functioned as contributing members of the larger society. Wolfenstein considered his options and decided that pulling the children, who had been attending public schools, back into the JOA for their educational needs was the answer. His goal was two-fold.

He kept the orphans “away from the corrupting influences of other children,” and he controlled their total educational experience, both secular and religious, in a way that helped them become

“refined citizens who favorably reflected American Judaism to the Christian world.”126

As it turned out, in Samuel Wolfenstein, the JOA had found the ideal superintendent:

He has the love and veneration of everyone who has ever been in the home. It may be truthfully said that the interest he takes in everyone who has ever been under his guidance is phenomenal … His former wards regard his as a parent. They go to him with all their troubles and joys and his advice to them means

124 “‘For Charity’s Sake.’ The Great Hebrew Fair at Music Hall: For the Benefit of the Little Fatherless Unfortunates at Cleveland: A Sketch of the Origin of the Asylum, Its Ends and Attainments: The Preparations for the Grand Event of the Work Characterized Alike by the Universal Liberality of Both Jew and Gentile.” Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), Sun., Oct. 23, 1881, 2. 125 Edward Dahlberg, Because I was Flesh (New Directions: 1963), 68 in Polster, 48. 126 Ibid., 73. 244

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much … their children delight in calling him grandpa … In fact, so attached are the former inmates to the home that they have formed alumni associations in communities where they live in large numbers, for the purpose of keeping in touch with it and contributing towards it support.127

This excerpt is heavy on praise, but opinions of a more reserved, or even contrary, nature did not

appear publicly. Not only did he build goodwill within the community, he developed warm and

affectionate relationships with many of the thousands of children who spent a portion of their

childhood in the JOA. These two groups, community and alumnae, were permeable. There was

little stigma within the larger Jewish community applied to former residents of the JOA. Orphans

who considered themselves blessed to have been raised in the orphanage were lifelong

ambassadors for the JOA. If they had the means, they gave money. If their resources were more modest, they peppered conversations about the asylum with positive anecdotes.128 Students who

showed extraordinary promise, like Jack Girick, were handpicked to attend public secondary

schools that exposed them to a curriculum that the JOA was unable to replicate.

The JOA was just one of several secular and sectarian, publicly- and privately-funded orphanages in Cleveland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like orphan asylums in

Cincinnati and Pittsburgh at the time, people of extraordinary commitment were integral to the successful transition of orphaned children from broken families to the relative stability of an institutional setting and then on to the adult world. Historian John J. Grabowski has noted that

“one of the hallmarks of the Progressive Era was a passion for order, for the elimination of unnecessary expenditures of time, energy, or money.”129 This passion for order not only

imbedded itself in the social reform movements but also among those who occupied vocations

127 “The Cleveland Orphan Asylum,” The Jewish Review and Observer (Cleveland, Ohio), Fri., Mar. 31, 1907. 128 Ibid. 129 John J. Grabowski, “Social Reform and Philanthropic Order in Cleveland, 1896-1920” in Van Tassell and Grabowski, Cleveland: A Tradition of Reform, 44. 245

24:11 that bridged the gap between reform and the philanthropies that funded it. Wolfenstein, who was apparently as much a social scientist as he was a rabbi and administrator, was an early progressive thinker.130 He possessed the steady authority of a father figure, but he was also willing to accept change and appreciated the need for growth and transformation: “It [the JOA] is now considering removal to the country and adoption of the cottage system, this again evincing its desire to keep strictly abreast of the times.”131 His willingness to experiment with the ways in which JOA orphans spent their days so that he molded them to reflect his own sense of morality, proper behavior, and religious practice put the JOA at the vanguard of Progressive reforms. In addition to social service and education reforms put into practice at the JOA at the turn of the century:

The city’s Jewish community pioneered in this area of philanthropic order, the unified solicitation of funds. Plagued by a proliferation of fiscal demands and agencies, many created to serve the large numbers of newly arrived eastern European Jews, leaders of the city’s Jewish community decided in 1904 to create a Federation of Jewish Charities. Headed by Martin Marks and Charles Eisenman, the federation undertook a single fund drive for all of its member agencies and then distributed the funds according to agency need. This was the fourth such unified fund drive undertaken among Jewish charitable agencies in the United States.132

Like its contemporary, the Catholic Charities Corporation, the Federation of Jewish Charities offered a single source for the collection of charitable donations that eliminated redundancy, winnowed administrative overhead, and reduced the financial and emotional burden of multiple worthy organizations returning repeatedly to the same pockets, whether those pockets were deep or shallow.

130 Crenson, 95-96, 101-102, 117-19. 131 “A Good Word for the Orphan Asylum,” Jewish Comment (Baltimore, MD) reprinted in The Jewish Independent, Fri. Jul. 31, 1908. 132 Clara Anne Kaiser, “Organized Social Work in Cleveland, It’s History and Setting” (PhD diss. Ohio State University, 1936), 131 quoted Grabowski, “Social Reform” in Van Tassell and Grabowski, Cleveland, A Tradition of Reform, 45. 246

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After the end of World War I, the JOA began a transformation through its own rebranding: “The change of the institution name from ‘Asylum’ to ‘Home’ was unanimously approved and Director Joseph and Trustee Meisel were instructed to take necessary legal steps to effect the change in the corporate name.”133 They also undertook a capital campaign that allowed the home to relocate out of its historic facility on Woodlawn and 55th Street to the suburbs, following the eastward trek of many Jewish families from the central city to greenspace and good schools. The neighborhood surrounding the orphanage had undergone a serious decline in the decades since the JOA purchased Dr. Seeley’s water sanitorium. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, it sat on seven acres firmly constrained by the boundaries of Cleveland’s third police district. The district, known infamously at that time as the “Roaring Third,” had transitioned from a middle-class residential district to one that hosted various criminal activities including drinking, gambling, and prostitution.134 This was hardly an ideal location in which to achieve the JOA’s goal to raise upstanding citizens.

In 1925, after years of planning, fundraising, and pre-development groundwork, the JOA found itself at an impasse nurtured by the overt antisemitism in the hands of elected officials of a small Cleveland suburb. The mayor and council of the Village of University Heights made public statements and took several steps to constructively deny the JOA the necessary approval for a zoning change that might allow it to build a new facility for the care of Jewish orphans on property it had purchased on Fairmont Avenue. The home had to bring a federal lawsuit against

133 “Trustees’ Meeting, July 13, 1919,” Container 5, Folder 1, Board Minutes 1914-1926, MS 3665, Bellefaire Records: Series I, WRHS. 134 University Heights, originally incorporated as Idlewood Village in 1907, changed its name in 1914 to reflect the relocation of John Carroll University to the Village. It was, at the time of the lawsuit brought the Jewish Orphan Home, a first-ring suburb of Cleveland with between four and five hundred residents. Stuart Meck, “Zoning and Antisemitism in the 1920s: The Case of Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum v. Village of University Heights and Its Aftermath.” Journal of Planning History, 4:2, May 1, 2005, 100. 247

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University Heights for violation of its due process rights resulting from the village’s zoning decision based in religious discrimination. After years in state, district, and circuit courts, the case was ultimately decided by the United States Supreme Court when it declined to grant a writ of certiorari to the defendants, letting stand the Sixth Circuit’s decision in favor of the JOA. The collage of images that follows is an artist’s rendering of the JOA’s new facility, Bellefaire, shows the influence of cottage-style institutional settings that replaced large institutions by the

1920s as they were to be built in University Heights.

Fig. 32 - “Bellefaire Jewish Children's Bureau, ca. 1929.”135

Author Stuart Meck has written that despite their defeat in the courts, the Village of

University Heights continued their campaign to encumber the legal result that favored the JOA by refusing to build a public school that served the children in residence.136 Regardless of this ongoing refusal, the construction was completed and the facility opened in the spring of 1929.

135 “Bellefaire Jewish Children’s Bureau, ca. 1929,” Container 15, Folder 13, MS 3665, Bellefaire Records, Series III, WRHS. 136 Meck, “Zoning and Antisemitism,” 110-11. 248

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The children attended school in Cleveland Heights, which abuts University Heights, instead. The

tension between University Heights and Bellefaire eventually relaxed but the process took years.

As with the Cleveland Protestant Orphan Home that changed its focus to become a residential

treatment facility as the number of orphans began to diminish, Bellefaire began to phase out

orphan care in order to take emotionally at-risk children in the early 1940s. Pittsburgh’s Jewish

community’s response to the needs of orphaned children borrowed from the experiences of

communities in Cleveland and Cincinnati, and then added its own Pittsburgh personality.

Pittsburgh

Jewish settlement in Pittsburgh was a generation behind that of Cincinnati and concurrent

with that of Cleveland. The first families settled sometime around 1840, although, like Cincinnati

and Cleveland, Jewish travelers certainly passed through much earlier on their way west or

south.137 Numbering about twenty individuals in total, Jews were a micro-minority among the

21,000 Pittsburghers of the time. In the years that followed an 1845 fire that destroyed more than

1,000 buildings, the tiny Jewish community held on like other affected Pittsburghers, through

local and national charitable assistance. Their numbers began to grow more steadily after the

1848 European revolutions turned the world of Europeans in general, Germans in particular, and

German Jews specifically, upside down. With the arrival of a number of these immigrants mid-

nineteenth century, the first Jewish congregation, Shaare Shemayim, was formed.138 Pittsburgh’s

137 The arrival date is an estimate as the city’s 1845 Great Fire destroyed many municipal records. Ironically, the fire began in an icehouse. Nevertheless, it destroyed one-third of the city, principally in the Golden Triangle area, and caused between $6 million and $12 million in damage, leaving 12,000 people homeless. “Awful Conflagration – Most Dreadful Calamity – Pittsburgh in Ruins!,” Pittsburgh Gazette (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Fri., Apr. 11, 1845, 1. 138 The congregations and the dates of their founding set forth in this section were culled from a timeline created by the staff of the Rauh Jewish Archives for the period of 1840 to 2012. I have focused on the establishment of congregations that predate 1930, the outside date of this study, although several were established or created through merger of existing congregations after that date. 249

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Jewish community was then just thirty families, but a brief dispute temporarily split the congregation. The congregation reconciled in 1856 and Shaare Shemayim eventually became

Rodef Shalom (in Hebrew, “peacemaker”). The first synagogue building was completed in 1862, the year after the commencement of the U.S. Civil War, when the Jewish population of

Pittsburgh reached approximately 750.

The city received another infusion of European Jewish immigrants in 1863 when Polish and Lithuanian Jews arrived in the United States after a failed revolt against the Russian Empire.

These immigrants founded the Tree of Life Congregation in 1864 and Congregation Beth

Hamedrash Hagodol in 1869. The following year, the Jewish population of the city reached

1,000. Pittsburgh’s Jewish community expansions were marked by diversity among the homelands of its immigrant arrivals and the speed at which new congregations were formed and supported. The year 1880 saw two million Jews flee to the United States from Russia and eastern

Europe in an attempt to escape the antisemitic pogroms and deprivations. Pittsburgh’s Jewish population doubled that year. Shaare Torah Congregation was also formed in 1880, followed a year later by the Poale Zedeck Synagogue. On the heels of this growth came the establishment of

Congregation Beth Jacob in 1883, Talmud Torah in 1885, Beth Abraham Congregation in 1888, and Tiphereth Israel Congregation in 1890 when the Jewish population of the city reached 5,000.

The 1890s and 1900s were oriented toward community cultural growth as well. The

Jewish community of Pittsburgh’s first English-language Jewish newspaper, The Criterion, began publishing in 1895, the same year that the Shaare Zedeck Congregation was founded. The

Machsikei Hadas Congregation was established in 1897 and the New Light (Oher Chodesh)

Congregation followed in 1899. By 1900, the Jewish population of the city was approximately

13,000. The Shaare Tefilah Congregation was founded in 1902, Cneseth Israel Congregation in

250

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1905, and a small Jewish congregation, known as the Butler Street Congregation, was founded

that same year. Jewish immigration to the United States peaked in 1906 with more than 150,000

Jews emigrating to escape eastern Europe and Russia. Beth Israel Congregation, Kether Torah

Congregation, and B’nai Zion Congregation were founded in 1907 and the Jewish population of

Pittsburgh rose to 25,000. Ahavos Zedeck Congregation was founded in 1908, B’nai Israel

Congregation in 1911, Beth Jehuda Congregation in 1913, Talmud Torah Congregation in 1914,

Adath Jeshurun Congregation in 1916, and Beth Shalom Congregation and the Ohave Zedeck

Congregation were founded in 1917. After the conclusion of World War I, which had seen a

pause in the founding of new congregations, Adath Israel Congregation and Aves Achim

Congregation were established in 1923, Mulbish Arunim in 1924, Chofetz Chaim Congregation

in 1925, and both Torath Chaim Congregation and B’nai Emunoh Congregation were founded in

1927. Truly, a score card might have helped in a city with 53,000 Jewish citizens and thirty-

seven congregations that represented every major tradition within Judaism. Pittsburgh’s Jewish

community had transcended its micro-minority status to become a key part of the diverse

communities of faith within a century of the arrival of that first little community of immigrants.

Each of the major American Jewish traditions had a significant presence in Pittsburgh,

including the Reform movement. The city was chosen by Kaufmann Kohler and Isaac Mayer

Wise to host the Conference of Reform rabbis in 1885. The goal of the conference was to

produce a common mission statement and methodology for the American Reform Movement.

The Pittsburgh Platform “called for a modern approach to Jewish ritual and emphasized certain

Jewish traditions such as social justice and helping those in need.”139 From the Pittsburgh

139 Lloyd P. Gartner, “American Judaism 1880-1945,” 44-45 in The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, ed. Dana Evan Kaplan (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 43-60; Lawrence Grossman, “Jewish Religious Denominations,” 82-83 in Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, 81-100; Lance J. Sussman, “The Myth of the Trefa Banquet: American Culinary Culture and the Radicalization of 251

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Platform came a unification of the Reform Movement and Reform Judaism had to first coalesce

into a united national organization before it was able to achieve a type of parity with the religious

authority of Orthodox Judaism. This Reform unification prompted traditionalists to establish the

Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations in 1898 and, in due course, the United Synagogue of

Conservative Judaism in 1913. The unification also put Reform on an equal but distinct footing with Orthodox and Conservative Judaism.140 It Americanized Judaism through a number of

compromises that focused on:

religious optimism, acceptance of other religious perspectives and emphasis on the Bible as the consecration of the Jewish people in its mission. It also makes modern sensibility the standard by rejecting halachic restrictions in diet, priestly purity and dress and discarding Jewish peoplehood. ‘We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.’141

This last sentiment stood in opposition to the Zionist dream of the establishment of a permanent

home for the Jewish people, beyond that of a home in perpetual exile. To answer that concern,

Pittsburgh also hosted the American Zionist Convention that was held in 1903, six years after

Theodore Herzl founded the Zionist Movement. The excitement with which many of the

convention’s stakeholders approached Zionism and the convention itself, helped the Zionist

Movement overcome the resistance of many Reform and Orthodox Jews.142

The commitment of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community to supporting charity was broad and deep. The first was the Bes Almon Society founded in 1847, which purchased a small parcel of land for the city’s first Jewish cemetery. The Hebrew Burial Society was founded in 1853 as a mutual aid association to help defray the cost of proper burials for those Jews whose families

Food Policy in American Reform Judaism,” Journal of the American Jewish Archives (2005), 29-52; and Kenyon Zimmer, “‘The Whole World is Our Country’: Immigration and Anarchism in the United States, 1885-1940,” Ph.D. Diss. 2010 (University of Pittsburgh). 140 Grossman, 83-85. 141 Ibid. 142 “American Zionist Convention,” The Rauh Jewish Archives, Heinz History Center. 252

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Jericho Lodge was founded in 1862, the Hebrew Benevolent Society in 1864, the Hebrew

Ladies’ Aid Society in 1865, the Cremeiux Society in 1874, the United Hebrew Relief

Association in 1880, the House of Shelter in 1883, the Hebrew Free Loan Society in 1887, the

Columbian Council of Jewish Women in 1894, and the Columbian Council’s Sisterhood of

Personal Service the following year. The Emma Kaufmann Clinic opened in 1897 and the

Hebrew Ladies’ Hospital Aid Society in 1898. As the charitable impulse turned outward, the

Hebrew Immigrant and Sheltering Aid Society was founded to help newly arriving Jewish immigrants in 1904, the year after the Kishinev riots.143 The Young Ladies’ Sick and Relief

Society and First Warsaw Benevolent Society were founded in 1905, the Jewish Home for the

Aged in 1906, the First Hebrew Austrian Beneficial Society (associated with Machsekei Hadas) was founded in 1907, and the Montefiore Hospital, Emma Farm Association, and Pliskover Free

Loan Association were all founded in 1908. Evidenced by the number of child-care organizations founded, Pittsburgh’s motto seemed to be “the more, the merrier.”

The Irene Kaufmann Settlement House was founded in 1910 to honor the memory of the late wife of the founder of the city’s Kaufmann’s department stores. The Federation of Jewish

Philanthropies of Pittsburgh was founded in 1912 and in conjunction with the National Council

143 Kishinev had a galvanizing force in Jewish communities. Coinciding with Easter 1903, antisemitic riots in the Moldovan (Russian territory) city of Kishinev, led to two days of violence in which thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed, more than four dozens Jews were killed and hundreds of women were raped. Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews (Cambridge University Press, 1984) 133-137, 462-484; Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard University Press, 2010), 126, 135-140; and Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (W. W. Norton, 2018), 101-104. Such blood libel had long been used as justification for the brutality of anti-Jewish persecution in across Europe. It spurred the mass migration of Russian Jews from the empire and inspired American Jews to rally once again around their co-religionists, even those from a different faith tradition. Unfortunately, antisemitism also found a home in the United States. 253

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of Jewish Women, Pittsburgh Section, created the Palestine Welfare Organization to supply

nurses and doctors to Jerusalem. The Bikur Cholim Society was founded by Rabbi Moses Sivitz

and several female volunteers to visit and comfort the sick, injured, and elderly that same year.

The Flower Fund of the Pittsburgh Federation of Jewish Philanthropies was established to collect

and distribute charitable donations in memory of loved ones in 1913. When it came to the

smallest members of the Jewish community, charity was extended through two main sources:

public organization and private donation.

The B’nai B’rith Orphanage and Home for Friendless Children (Erie Home), in Erie,

Pennsylvania, served children from IOBB District No. 3 which included Pennsylvania, West

Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland. First proposed in 1908 by Erie lawyer and IOBB member

Isador Sobel, the idea was approved in 1910 and Erie was selected as the site, an interesting

choice since Erie is only 100 miles from Cleveland, site of the JOA, and at the northernmost

boundary of District No. 3, approximately 130 miles north of Pittsburgh. IOBB leadership did

not allow construction to begin until a $10,000 annual maintenance fund was guaranteed.144 That

requirement met, the next step was to establish a construction fund, but in the meantime, the Erie

Home opened in a temporary facility in Avonia, Pennsylvania on July 4, 1912. In order to meet

their share of the commitment to finance the construction projects at the Erie Home, the Jewish

community of Pittsburgh was expected to raise $12,000 during a one-week fundraising drive,

which required an average $15 donation from every member of the Pittsburgh IOBB lodge:

… men and women who are identified with ALL worthy Jewish causes and the fact that they are devoting their time and attention and giving generously of the MEANS AND THEIR SERVICES should commend it to those who perhaps are not acquainted with the work. The drive will last but one week, and it is hoped that more than enough will be raised to promote the necessary additions at Erie.

144 “B’nai B’rith Orphanage and Home for Friendless Children of District No. 3, Erie, Pa,” The Jewish Criterion (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Fri., Aug. 23, 1919, 40. 254

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REMEMER WHEN YOU GIVE TO HELP AN ORPHAN THAT YOU CAN NEVER MAKE ANY MISTAKE IN YOUR GIVING.145

Construction of the Erie Home proceeded on schedule. Between Pittsburgh’s Jewish community and donations from other District No. 3 members, sufficient funding commitments were secured to complete construction on facilities situated on the 95-acre parcel of land purchased for the

Erie Home in late 1914. A harsh winter and lack of electricity on the property until the following year delayed occupation until the end of May 1915.146 Twenty-seven children and caregivers and administrators were among the first residents when the facility opened. Unfortunately, the Erie

Home experienced difficulties early on in obtaining ongoing financial support from the Jewish community of Pittsburgh. An article which appeared in The Jewish Criterion, in May 1913, reminded Pittsburgh’s Jewish citizens, in part:

The orphanage is located in Erie, but it belongs to us in Pittsburgh as well as to Jews in other sections of District No. 3 … Distance doesn’t always lend enchantment. Especially is this true in cases of philanthropy … So what our people need is a more active imagination in order to realize that this Orphanage in ERIE is OUR responsibility as much as it is the residents of any other part of this State. It is true that it is a B’nai B’rith Orphanage. But after all who is the B’nai B’rith? Ourselves.147

Financial issues continued to require significant attention over the years that the Erie Home cared for children, although it remained in operation until 1949. Regrettably, the records of the Erie

Home did not survive.

The Jewish Home for Babies and Children was founded in 1914, the same year that the

Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of Pittsburgh created the Community Endowment Fund. The

Jewish Children’s Aid Society was founded in 1917, and the Pittsburgh Bureau for Jewish

145 “Editorial: B’nai B’rith Orphanage Drive,” The Jewish Criterion (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Fri., May 16, 1913 (transcript), n.p. 146 The Jewish Criterion (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Sat., Aug. 23, 1919, 40. 147 “Editorial: B’nai B’rith Orphanage Drive,” The Jewish Criterion (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Mon., May 23, 1913. 255

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Children was created by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies to evaluate the welfare of

Jewish dependent children and to find foster homes for orphaned children in 1922. These publicly-funded bureaus and homes provided services into the Progressive Era, but the first home for Jewish children was founded twenty years before by the widow of successful Jewish businessman, Jacob Gusky.

Fig. 33 – “Gusky's Advertisement – 1891.”148

Jacob Mark Gusky was born July 10, 1845 in New York City. His father died when he was young and the experience of losing a parent so early remained with him into adulthood. His mother later remarried a man named Simon Cohen who was a pattern cutter in the New York garment district. Gusky’s access to clothing manufacturers through his stepfather later proved fortuitous.149 Jacob apprenticed with a printer in New York until his twentieth birthday and then relocated to Pittsburgh in 1864 at the request of an acquaintance of Cohen, a clothier named

Meyer Hanauer, to market Hanauer’s clothing. At Gusky’s urging “his stepfather purchased

148 “Gusky’s Grand Emporium Clothing,” 1891, Rauh Jewish Archives, Heinz History Center. 149 “Jacob Mark Gusky,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Biography of Pennsylvania, III (Atlantic Publishing and Engraving, 1898), 178-79. 256

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Hanauer’s business,” and when Cohen retired, Gusky renamed the business after himself.150

Starting as a two-man operation in a one-room storefront downtown, within a decade, Gusky had grown the business into a four-story building that occupied an entire block of Market Street in downtown Pittsburgh.

Gusky’s was known for selection, fair prices, and inspired modern marketing (i.e.,

“Gusky’s Grand Emporium Clothing,”) that built customer loyalty and it was the leading men’s department store in the city through much of the latter three decades of the nineteenth century.

Gusky’s customer base was comprised principally of working men and boys and Jacob had a special affinity for union members. In fact, he bailed out George Barkly, Barkly’s son Charles, and other members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, who had been charged with assault in January of 1882 in connection with the labor unrests at Homestead

Steel.151 Gusky’s sincere appreciation for working men played out in unexpected ways too, as

when he donated 4,000 umbrellas and walking canes for any union members who wanted to walk

in the 1886 Pittsburgh Labor Day Parade.152

Jacob Gusky also earned the surprising nickname of “Pittsburgh’s Jewish Santa.” Local

newspapers and the Jewish press were rife with articles on the generosity of Gusky and his family year-round, but especially at Hanukah and Christmas. Gusky’s generosity to orphans began in 1881, the first year two costumed Santas and twenty-five wagons loaded with wrapped presents for both boys and girls, split into two convoys, one bound for the orphanages in

Allegheny City and the second for the asylums of Pittsburgh and departed from the front of

150 Barbara Burstin, Steel City Jews: A History of Pittsburgh and Its Jewish Community (Barbara Burstin, 2008), 67-68. 151 Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 186. 152 Burstin, 85, n. 348. 257

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Gusky’s Grand Emporium at 9:00 on Christmas morning.153 Their outreach to the children of orphanages and orphan asylums was not constrained by religious boundaries – every child, regardless of faith – was the beneficiary of the Guskys’ kindness. Their efforts brought these children the joy of knowing that there were adults who had an interest in their happiness. The

Guskys and their employees also sponsored and chaperoned summer picnics, riverboat rides, fall hayrides, and other special surprises.154 Jacob’s premature death from pneumonia in October of

1886 when he was just 41 years old, was expected to signal an end to the holiday tradition, but

Esther and the store management took out a full-page advertisement letting all of Pittsburgh

know that the tradition would go on, despite Jacob’s passing. Gusky had, in his brief life, reached

the pinnacle of public appreciation and acclaim, not merely for what he had accomplished

economically, but for his achievements as a human being who reached out to fellow citizens of

all ages, especially dependent children, regardless of religious affiliation.

153 “Fifth Grand Annual Tour of the Orphan Homes of Pittsburg and Allegheny,” Pittsburg Daily Post, Dec. 16, 1886, n.p. I would like to acknowledge the contribution of Sue Morris, whose blog, “The Historical Dilettante” provided a delightful thread for me to follow on the contributions of Jacob Gusky to the Pittsburgh philanthropic scene in the late nineteenth century. www.historicaldilettante.blogspot.com. 154 The Jewish Criterion, 2:12, Oct. 25, 1895. 258

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Fig. 34 – “‘Fifth Grand Annual Tour of the Orphan Homes of Pittsburg and Allegheny,’ Pittsburg Daily Post, Dec. 16, 1886.”155

The image in this feature juxtaposes the little girl on one end of the telephone connection against the image of Santa in his workshop on the other end of the line. Even if you did not take time to read the entire article, the message was clear, Santa would make his rounds to the orphaned children of Pittsburgh and Allegheny City. As a further testament to Gusky’s impact, the

Allegheny County courthouse sports a bronze memorial plague to honor him just inside its Grant

Street entrance:

155 “Fifth Grand Annual Tour of the Orphan Homes of Pittsburg and Allegheny,” Pittsburg Daily Post, Thu., Dec. 16, 1886. 259

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Fig. 35 - “J. M. Gusky: Merchant and Philanthropist, 1845-1886, Bronze Plaque, n.d.”156

The plaque reads, in part:

J. M. Gusky Merchant and Philanthropist Founder of Pittsburgh’s First Department Store His Charity Knew Not the Bounds of Either Race or Creed To Make Others Happy Gave Him the Greatest Joy To Children His Heart Went Out At His Death the People in One Voice Said, ‘There Lies a Man.’ “I Have Heard of Thee by the Hearing of the Ear But Now Mine Eye Seeth Thee.”

Esther and Jacob had two sons and two daughters, all adolescents at the time of Jacob’s death. Still a young woman when her husband died, Esther continued the family outreach to children in a way perhaps Jacob never imagined. Her tribute to her late husband’s legacy of giving was the establishment of the orphanage that bore his name. The J. M. Gusky Hebrew

Orphanage and Home of Western Pennsylvania (Gusky Home) was opened in 1890, the first

Jewish orphanage to be built in Pittsburgh. Previously, all Jewish foundlings and orphans had

156 “J. M. Gusky: Merchant and Philanthropist, 1845-1886,” Bronze Plaque. Author’s Collection. 260

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been sent to secular or Christian orphanages, a reality that worried members of the Jewish

community, including Esther Gusky, who saw in the orphanage a way to honor the memory of

her husband and fill a community need. When Jacob died she decided upon establishing the

orphanage because Jacob always “had a ‘real soft spot for orphans.’” 157 That was an

understatement. Her initial gift toward the home included the land on which the facility was built

and $30,000 for its construction.158 The home was “a favorite charity among Pittsburgh’s

German-speaking Jewish community, most of whom were embers of Esther Gusky’s

congregation, Rodef Shalom.”159 The home also became a charitable Rodef Shalom family affair

for the DeRoy, Rauh, and Hamburger families who not only donated money to support the home,

some of them also became involved in the home’s day-to-day operations.160

The Gusky Home did not operate on the scale of the JOA in Cleveland or the larger

Protestant and Catholic orphanages, but it eventually accommodated up to 100 children at a time.

The Gusky Home registration book sheds a partial light on the backgrounds of the children

admitted to and dismissed during its years in operation. Like their gentile contemporaries, entries for these children told tales of parental death or desertion. The children attended public school and received religious education through Rodef Shalom. They were also taught to pass on their blessings through tzedakah. Like fellow orphans from the JOA, they formed an alumni association, that not only contributed financially to the Gusky Home but spoke with affectionate

157 Burstin, 85. 158 “Philanthropist Dies in East: Former Pittsburgher Was Noted for Her Charitable Work Here. Founder of an Asylum,” The Gazette Times (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Sun., Jan. 18, 1914. “Gusky Home and Orphanage,” The Rauh Jewish Archives, Heinz History Center. 159 “Gusky Home and Orphanage,” The Rauh Jewish Archives, Heinz History Center. 160 Ibid. 261

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reverence at their time in the home, even decorating the graves of the home’s deceased

benefactors.161

These children represented a number of nationalities, although nearly seventy-five

percent were either native-born American or Russian. The remaining twenty-five percent were

English, Italian, Hungarian, Austrian, or Romanian. Sometimes children aged out of the home or

became self-supporting through employment.162 A few children were shown to have been “lured

away” by their surviving parent.163 There was also evidence that a number of these children were taken in by the Gusky Home on a temporary basis, usually for a period between the death of a parent and the remarriage of the surviving parent.164 The home employed a number of

husband/wife superintendent/matron teams during its fifty-two years of operation but to provide

names ultimately reflected producing an incomplete list.

The Rodef Shalom family rose to fill the need in oversight, and fundraising. Vice

president of the Gusky Home, Joseph DeRoy, and a group of dedicated volunteers opened a

refreshment stand in Schenley Park in the city’s Oakland neighborhood. Their successful, if

temporary, business venture was established to help cover the operating costs of the orphanage

that was struggling financially because of the Depression of 1893. Brothers Israel and Joseph

DeRoy founded DeRoy Brothers, a jewelry store on the first floor of a house at 47 Smithfield

Street, in downtown Pittsburgh, circa 1871. Eventually, the brothers parted ways in the family

161 Ibid. 162 “Admission and Dismissals,” Digital Transcript, The J. M. Gusky Hebrew Orphanage and Home of Western Pennsylvania, Unprocessed Collection, The Rauh Jewish Archives, Heinz History Center. 163 Ibid. 164 Ibid. 262

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business to open their own stores. By the 1880s, Joseph left his sons in charge of his store and

took on the administration of the Gusky Home.165

Esther continued to support the orphanage for the rest of her life and provided for the home in her will when she died in 1914. But substantial donations for the support of the home also had to come from members of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community. Where the JOA counted on the largesse of Jews and some Christians in its fundraising efforts (especially during Orphan

Fairs throughout District no. 2), the Gusky Home had a smaller pool of donors from which to draw. The Jewish Criterion admonished the Christian community of Pittsburgh who did not step forward to aid a home founded in memory of a man who had always responded with an open heart to the needs of orphaned children regardless of the professed faith of their mothers and fathers.166 In 1899, The Jewish Criterion also challenged its female readers, who sat with closed

purses, rather than join the Gusky Home’s Ladies Auxiliary for a five dollar annual dues

payment.167 The Ladies Auxiliary never rose above its peak membership of 250 individuals,

even when the Jewish population of the city reached into the tens of thousands.

165 The Home and Orphanage was founded in “1890 by Esther Gusky, in memory of her husband, Jacob Mark Gusky. [An] Annex … built in 1889, was the gift of Aaron Cohen in memory of his wife, Bertha Rauh Cohen, the only daughter of Rosalia Rauh and the late Solomon Rauh.” Prominent Families of Pittsburgh, (1912), digital edition, Archive.org. https://archive.org/stream/prominentfamilie1912pitt/prominentfamilie1912pitt_djvu.txt. 166 “The Gusky Benefit,” The Jewish Criterion, 10:17, Fri., Nov. 3, 1899, n.p. 167 Ibid. 263

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Fig. 36 – “Gusky Orphanage and Home and Bertha Rauh Cohen Memorial, ca. 1910.”168

In 1902, however, two prominent families made significant donations that funded much-needed

improvements at the home. Mr. and Mrs. Francis Thomas Fletcher Lovejoy and Mr. and Mrs.

Charles M. Schwab each donated $5,000 to cover the cost of the improvements at the Gusky

Home.169 Lovejoy, a Scottish-born American and Schwab, a native-born German American from

Loretto, Pennsylvania were contemporaries and colleagues of Andrew Carnegie. Like Carnegie,

in later years they turned toward philanthropic efforts. Lovejoy retained enough of his wealth to

live a comfortable retirement while Schwab, who for a time had the confidence of men like

Carnegie and Henry C. Frick, lost it, the presidency of U.S. Steel, and his sizeable fortune before

he died.170 If timing is everything, then Mrs. Cohen and Mrs. Rauh undertook their solicitation of

the Schwabs at a fortuitous moment. The Gusky Home closed in 1943 rather than transform its mission.

168 “Gusky Orphanage and Home and Bertha Rauh Cohen Memorial,” Postcard, ca. 1910. The Rauh Jewish Archives, Heinz History Center. 169 “$10,000 for the Gusky Home: Mr. and Mrs. F. T. F. Lovejoy Contribute $5,000, and Mr. and Mrs. Charles M. Schwab Give $5,000: Mrs. Josiah Cohen and Mrs. Enoch Rauh Obtain the Donations,” The Jewish Criterion, 14:6, Fri., Jun. 6, 1902, 5. 170 Robert Hessen, Steel Titan: The Life of Charles M. Schwab (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 285-303. 264

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***

The Israelites stood at the shore of the Red Sea with freedom ahead of them and the

armies of pharaoh closing in. Their very existence depended on taking bold action, commanded

by God, but instead was stymied by paralyzing hesitation. When courage was required,

Nachshon ben Aminidav was the first to take a true leap of faith enabling the Israelites to escape

their pursuers. This courage to do the right thing, even in the face of broad opposition, became

synonymous with his name. As European Jews immigrated to the American Midwest where they

were joined by American Jews migrating from established cities in the East, history did not

repeat itself, but it did rhyme.171 Not since the Israelites stood with their toes in the Sea of Reeds

had there been such an opportunity to claim both providence and self-determination in a new

land.

Jewish communities of colonial America and the early republic of United States clustered along the Atlantic seaboard. In the beginning, they were often self-isolating, incubating their communities while negotiating early American lives and citizenship. As they were joined by small numbers of fellow Jews over the course of the eighteenth century, these communities expanded and connections began to be established with the dominant Christian populations of the cities in which these communities existed. New immigrants surely braved dangerous voyages and uncertain futures to make it here, but could be comforted in knowing that those who had preceded them would be on hand to greet them.

It would take a different mindset to venture to the American frontier at the turning of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Jewish pioneers of the West (or more appropriately, the

171 “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” attributed to American humorist, author, and anti- imperialist, Mark Twain. 265

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Midwest) were the Nachshons of American Jewish settlement in the lands beyond the

Appalachian Mountains. It was their collective character, individually expressed, to take the

courageous steps necessary to travel where no built-in Jewish community existed, and to start one from scratch. These early settlers, whether in Cincinnati, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh proved to be resilient and resourceful. But as early rabbis would learn, the mental toughness that allowed these pioneers to thrive in proto-civilized urban areas, made them hard to please, and sometimes, even to reason with. Their strength of personality was tempered over time but needed eventually be met, face to face, without flinching, by those of equal passion and tenacity.

As Jewish communities across the nation matured, they often assumed different communal personalities that stood in balance with the dominant faith of the cities, not in contrast. That meant that the ways in which the city accommodated Progressive thought and reform was reflected in the ways its Jewish community did as well. The programs that had their roots in the American Reform Judaism movement began with Isaac Mayer Wise in Cincinnati but also reverberated in Cleveland as Pittsburgh. This exposure to deep religious reform at the institutional level prepared Jewish communities for synergy with the political and social reforms that would race through American society during the Progressive Era.

Cincinnati’s place in American Jewish history as the home of the American Reform

Movement, the Hebrew Union College, the nation’s first Jewish hospital, and the nation’s oldest

Jewish community west of the Alleghenies is secure. It was, by and large, a happily self- sustaining group that thrived relatively unchallenged in its strongly German cultural roots although even conservative, some might say backward, Cincinnati felt the impact of the late nineteenth century’s historic waves of immigration which changed the composition of the community by introducing eastern European Jews into the local community. Among both

266

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groups, principally German Jews and minority eastern European Jews, Jewish laity such as the

Freiberg and Manischewitz families stepped forward to lead charitable efforts that benefitted orphaned and abandoned children. In addition, a gap in the care of children in need of mentors, if not a parent, was also filled by adopted Cincinnatian Irvin Westheimer whose efforts to a personable young man in need, was the seed from which Big Brothers/Big Sisters matured.

Cleveland’s founding Jewish family, the Peixottos, were instrumental in bringing the

charitable efforts of the International Order of B’nai B’rith to bear on the problem of American

Jewish U.S. Civil War orphans. The JOA was Cleveland based but not Cleveland bound. The

IOBB’s commitment to a regional approach in creating an institution that was large enough to

engender respect for its mission both within and outside the community. Accomplishing its goal

of raising productive citizens, meant that its alumni were critical in keeping the home moving

toward its goal of relocating to the suburbs for the benefit of the children. The fact that they

scored a moral and legal victory in the process against an antisemitic municipality was a bonus.

Pittsburgh, the most ethnically diverse of the cities of this study, benefitted from the size

of its Jewish community in relation to the whole. Later to the trend of establishing an orphanage

to care for Jewish orphans than Cincinnati or Cleveland, Pittsburgh’s Jewish community was

inspired by a charismatic transplant to the city who, within the span of twenty years, had built a

successful business and endeared himself to the orphans and administrators of the city’s

orphanages, regardless of the faith of the child. It would be up to his widow to establish the

orphanage that would carry his name and his mission into the twentieth century. The Jewish

community also learned the challenges and benefits of providing for children from across a

significant geographic region in their support, sometimes difficult to maintain, for the IOBB’s

Erie Home. Pittsburgh’s Jewish citizens were extremely active in matters of faith, family, and

267

24:11 philanthropy. Perhaps the sheer number of worthy charities who solicited with personal campaigns and newspaper editorials exhausted the generous spirit of the Jewish community.

Changes in funding, institutional format and programming were quickly approaching across all fields of dependent childcare, regardless of religious conviction. In the final chapter, the weft that has been created by the stories of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish charitable efforts for dependent children will be brought into conversation with the warp of Progressive Era child- saving reforms. Where there were areas of common purpose, the process went smoothly, and where difficulty in adapting to new social priorities made traditional practices obsolete, institutions either learned to transform their missions or shuttered their doors.

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Chapter 6 Fostering Change: Adopting Progressive Era Child Welfare Reforms

Fig. 37 – “Udo J. Keppler, ‘The Bigger Stick,’ Cover, Puck, Jul. 17, 1907.”1

Surely nothing ought to interest our people more than the care of the children who are destitute and neglected but not delinquent. Personally, I earnestly believe that the best way in which to care for dependent children is in the family home. In Massachusetts … thousands of the children who formerly have gone to the orphan asylums are now kept in private homes, either on board … or in adopted homes provided by the generosity of foster parents.

Theodore Roosevelt2

When you need someone willing to carry the big stick, who better than the man credited with inscribing that image on the American cultural psyche?3 First appearing in an interview

1 An isolated image from the larger illustration, Udo J. Keppler, “The Bigger Stick,” Cover, Puck, Jul. 17, 1907, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2011647220/. 2 “Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to James E. West,” dated Dec. 25, 1908. Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital- Library/Record?libID=o218950. 3 “Gambling and Vice in the State Capital: Inconsistency of Some Lawmakers Who Prate About the Wickedness of the Metropolis. Haunts That They Patronize. How the Pages Enjoy Themselves After the Legislators Get Through – Some of Roosevelt’s Tactics,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Apr. 1, 1900, 39. 269

24:11 published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, then New York governor, Theodore Roosevelt, told the reporter: “‘Speak softly – carry a big stick – and you will go far.’ But he added … ‘if you simply speak softly the other man will bully you. If you leave your stick at home you will find the other man did not. If you carry the stick only and forget to speak softly in nine cases out of ten, the other man will have a bigger stick.’”4 As Keppler’s image conveys, there was a public fixation on Roosevelt, love him or not. Political cartoonists of the day fed this preoccupation with images that portrayed Roosevelt’s confidence, vitality, and can-do optimism, but in ways that simultaneously held him up in both the highest regard and with the deepest scorn.5 Just a few years later, the reformers seeking changes in the care of America’s dependent children spoke persistently, but softly, and gained little traction in their efforts. They needed the big stick of presidential pressure to convene a desired meeting of the disparate group of dependent child welfare reform stakeholders.

On Christmas Day 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt invited more than two hundred men and women with expertise in child welfare and child-saving reform to attend a conference sponsored by his administration at the end of the following month. The fact that the letter was dated December 25th is noteworthy. It might simply have been that with the end of the Roosevelt administration approaching, the secretaries typing around the clock to keep up with the high- energy Roosevelt and they just happened to be working on Christmas Day. Or, alternatively, it was an intentional choice to signal invitees that the Christ child’s birthday was a fortuitous day on which to call for such a meeting. This conference, the first of its kind on the subject of reforming American child welfare, was held January 25-26, 1909 and carried the cachet of a

4 Ibid. 5 David Greenberg, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Image of Presidential Activism,” Social Research 78:4 (Winter 2011), 1057-88. 270

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White House imprimatur and the opportunity to interact with the president to entice participants.

It represented a milestone on the journey toward achieving Progressive reforms across child welfare’s broad mission—one that included issues of health, education, child labor, and orphan care. The conference represented the culmination of years of efforts by reformers to put dependent child welfare in front of the American public and those in Washington with the power to enact legislation to codify meaningful change.6 The conference also had the potential to positively impact future generations of American children with innovations in social welfare policy. This envisioned policy reflected the changing view of the institution of childhood and sensitivities to “the natural innocence of children.”7

The White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children brought the work of reformers such as Lillian Wald, Jacob Riis, C. Loring Brace, Jr. and his brother Robert, and

Florence Kelley to a wider public audience. The conference itself became a tradition, held every decade into the 1970s, and later rebranded the “White House Conference on Children and

Youth.” There were two overarching goals of the inaugural conference: first, to establish a basis for cooperation among the various child welfare community stakeholders around the creation of an agency to collect and disseminate child-related data, and second, to push for alternatives to the use of large-scale institutional care for orphans and children in need of a home. The targets of this reform movement included the secular institutions such as houses of reform and houses of refuge.8 More important for the purposes of this study, reformers primarily focused their efforts on the large, sectarian institutions administered by American Jews, Catholics, and Protestants.

6 Phyllis A. Wentworth, “Child Welfare Reformers, Academic Psychologists, and the Dependent Child in Progressive Era America,” PhD Diss., University of New Hampshire, 2002, 17. 7 Theresa Richardson, “Children of the State, Contingency and Progress: White House Conferences on Children and Youth,” American Educational History Journal, 38:2 (2011), 378. 8 See the discussion in Chapter 2. 271

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By 1900, the American population exceeded 76 million, and more than thirteen percent

of her citizens were foreign born.9 Florence Kelley, known for her crusade to end child labor

among other efforts, joined her friend, Henry Street Settlement founder and innovator in public

health nursing, Lillian D. Wald, to push for the creation of a federal agency. This agency was

proposed to gather data useful in formulating national policy on a number of childhood-related

concerns including: “infant mortality, birth registration, orphaned children, desertion,

illegitimacy, degeneracy, juvenile delinquency, offenses against children, illiteracy, and child

labor.”10 Reformers were open to crossing boundaries of faith to form strong personal

relationships despite differences in the belief systems into which they were inculcated at an early

age. Among these, for example were Kelley, whose family were Quakers, and Wald, whose

family were observants of the Reform tradition of Judaism.11 This interfaith cooperation, based

in friendship and common purpose, was a welcome change to what usually amounted to spiritual

territorial protectionism within and outside of child welfare programming. Kelley and Wald

discussed the idea of a bureau dedicated to children’s issues with Columbia University sociology

professor Edward T. Devine who straightaway reached out to his friend, President Theodore

Roosevelt. Roosevelt reportedly replied, “Bully, come down and tell me about it.”12 It was 1903.

9 More than 10.4 million Americans were foreign born in 1900 or 13.6% of the total population. United States Census 1900 quoted in We, the American Foreign Born, Bureau of the Census, United States Department of Commerce (Sep. 1993), https://www.census.gov/prod/cen1990/wepeople/we-7.pdf. 10 The Children’s Bureau Legacy: Ensuring the Right to Childhood, Administration of Children, Youth, and Families, The Children’s Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, United States Department of Health and Human Services (United States Printing Office, 2013), https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/cb_ebook.pdf. 11 Although Wald’s family were members of the Reform congregation B’rith Kodesh in Rochester, New York “Wald received no formal Jewish education.” Marjorie N. Feld, “Lillian D. Wald,” Jewish Women’s Archive, https://www.jwa.org. 12 The Children’s Bureau Legacy. 272

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This was an important inflection point, but work behind the scenes to remake child welfare in the United States began decades before. The first attempt at reform of dependent child welfare was the adoption of the German Waisenhaus movement that promoted the large institutional-orphanage format. Ironically, the Waisenhaus movement fell out of favor for its incongruity with Progressives’ idealization of foster care, the system it had replaced. Child welfare in early American history was somewhere near the middle of a very long list of social, cultural, and political concerns. Prior to the importation of European institutional care models, children were taken into almshouses or foster homes, neither of which were consistently ideal alternatives.13 Early institutions, aside from the poor house or work house, both intended for adults, were segregated by race, ethnicity, and religious faith.14 Juvenile delinquents were a tangential class of dependent children who also deserved care, but by virtue of their contact with law enforcement and the court system, had established themselves as behaviorally defective in their day.15 Their care was not a significant part of the first conference although it would become a focus of later gatherings.

Proponents of foster care, or the placing-out system, such as the late Rev. Charles Loring

Brace of the Children’s Aid Society, had long argued for the benefits of removing children from institutional settings to place them in individual homes. As discussed in Chapter 2, however, the

Children’s Aid Society orphan train administrators did not always make safe and loving placements for the thousands of children relocated from the Atlantic coast to the Great Plains.

Some of these children were accepted into new homes as members of the family while others

13 Cathleen A. Lewandowski, Child Welfare: An Integrative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2018), 6-10. 14 Ibid., 11-15. 15 Ibid., 20-22. 273

24:11 were treated as indentured workers. Although they certainly represented a small percentage of the total, some of the orphan train riders were also physically and emotionally abused:

Biological families were broken up, their children literally kidnapped off the streets; children were placed in farm homes without any knowledge of their biological families; oftentimes there was no supervision of the home after placement; and few records were ever kept of the placement. The greatest offender in this regard—and the most influential child-placing institution in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century—was the Children’s Aid Society.16

In addition, Progressives found fault with immigrant parents who sent their children off to work for the benefit of the family: “immigrants stood out for their cultural backwardness, since some ethnic groups seemed eager to enjoy the income of their sons and daughters.”17 The American cultural mindset of the period was well along the trajectory of elevating the institution of childhood to a state where children were guaranteed happiness, parental love, and protection. “If children were earning money through work, they were not properly loved.”18 Therefore, making your children work was a form of abuse. This mindset energized Florence Kelley and contributed to her successful efforts to end child labor.

The lexicon of Progressive child welfare form expanded to accommodate the movement’s new goals. When all institutions built for the care of orphans were large, warehouse- sized facilities, there was no need to refer to them as anything other than orphanages, asylums, or homes, since there was nothing from which to differentiate them. In the 1850s in Europe, innovations in orphan care philosophy led to ideas about housing orphans in smaller units, i.e., cottages, and so it was necessary to create the binary in terminology, hence “congregate.”19

16 E. Wayne Carp, “Adoption and the Family in Early-Twentieth-Century America,” OAH Magazine of History (Summer 2001) 15:4, 66. 17 Brian Gratton and Jon Moen, “Immigration, Culture, and Child Labor in the United States, 1880-1920,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 34:3 (Winter 2004), 356. 18 Ibid. 19 Crenson, 131-32. 274

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“Congregate systems,” found favor as a pejorative with those opposed to care provided in

asylum settings. Conflating “congregate,” and its definition of “large gatherings in a single

location,” with the negative connotations the reform community assigned to orphanages run by

religious communities, quite literally, congregations, was perhaps happenstance, but more likely,

a purposeful choice. In addition, in using this identifier, any non-private home was essentially

classifiable as a congregate setting. Reformers realized, of course, it was not possible for all

currently institutionalized children to be moved immediately into foster or adoptive homes, and

“cottage systems” became the setting of choice when institutional care was unavoidable. It

“secures for the children a larger degree of association with adults and a nearer approach to the

conditions of life.”20 In a smaller physical setting with a higher caregiver-to-child ratio, the

thought was that children were able to rely on the unit’s smaller, family-like dynamic for

emotional growth and support. Typically, there was a houseparent in charge of twenty-five

children, rather than 100 or more, in his or her care. Women were to play a significant role in the

reforms as they had in the administration of traditional settings.

The American cult of domesticity, where women were seen as the foundation of religion

in the home and as the promoters of a civilized society, took shape in the early days of the

American republic, in response to the challenges of changing gendered roles driven by the

metamorphosis of the nation’s economy from an agricultural to a manufacturing one. Such a

transformation had implications for economic, social, and political relationships. Historically,

socio-economic class has been the dominant analytical lens within capitalism, but gendered

studies have helped define relationships to economic power and social roles.21 The

20 Gertrud Lenzer, “Family First in Historical Perspective,” The Chronicle of Social Change, Sep. 28, 2016. https://chronicleofsocialchange.org/child-welfare-2/families-first-in-historical-perspective/21510. 21 These differences also had a role in determining regional income per capita in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sukkoo Kim, “Economic Integration and Convergence: U.S. Regions, 1840-1987,” 275

24:11 corresponding transformation of the American family continued over the course of the nineteenth century as well, from that of an economic unit where everyone was involved in producing for the family, thereby ensuring its daily survival, to one where men and women took on distinct roles that altered standards of gendered interaction with society at large. As explored earlier in this study, the growth of the American middle class pushed the boundaries of traditional roles for men and women. American women who chose the labor and love of motherhood were admired for their efforts, and even women for whom motherhood was not an option, and perhaps not even a goal, found increasingly socially acceptable alternatives for self-expression and achievement.22

Individual transformations of women changed the dynamics of relationships between and among women from a near-exclusive sisterhood of mothers to a sisterhood of mothers, coworkers, and reformers, where an increasing number of women focused more on individual goals in relation to public interaction than they did goals related to a husband and family. A majority of American women, however, did not make radical changes within their own families.

Instead, they chose the rewards of “true womanhood,” that came from taking care of children and the home. Concurrent with the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a segment of these “True Women,” became “Real Women,” identified as the “fitter, more educated” iteration of True Women.23 Alternatively, they became “Public Women with careers that placed them in the public eye”: school teachers, retail shop clerks, and reform advocates, or they became “New

The Journal of Economic History 58:3, 659-83; Ellen Gordon-Bouvier, “Crossing the Boundaries of the Home: A Chronological Analysis of the Legal Status of Domestic Work,” International Journal of Law in Context, 15:4 (Dec. 2019), 479-94; Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public State: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Ann M. Oberhauser, “Feminism and Economic Geography: Gendering Work and Working Gender,” in A Companion to Economic Geography, eds. Eric Sheppard and Trevor J. Barnes (Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 60-77. 22 McGerr, 264-69; Wiebe, 122-23; and Edwards, 60-63, 66-67. 23 Susan M. Cruea, “Changing Ideals of Womanhood During the Nineteenth-Century Woman Movement,” American Transcendental Quarterly, 19:3 (Sep. 2005), 188. 276

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Women,” those who were freed “from social expectations and conditions forced upon them by tradition.” 24

The cult of true womanhood reasserted itself in the twenty-five year period on either side of the turn of the twentieth century as a response to cultural anxiety surrounding the ascendance of the New Woman, but the qualities of: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness that marked its original appearance were under stress as the turn of the twentieth century.25 These characteristics were juxtaposed against the ideas of the politically active New Woman in the pages of popular magazines of the period. Middle-class women, the primary readership of these magazines, had more time to turn their attention to creating domestic environments that were previously only aspirational, the ones that beckoned from the pages of illustrated women’s magazines. These periodicals portrayed blissful, beautiful homes with happy husbands, bouncing babies, and serene mothers overseeing it all. This cultural mindset endured through the Gilded

Age and into the Progressive Era as the middle and upper classes attempted to distance themselves from the working poor, even as they sought ways to lift those who were downtrodden from what they saw as desperate and depraved circumstances. With the rise of Progressive thought, actions to elevate the lives of the poor often took priority over the willingness to relinquish the ideals of personal domestic perfection. Women who had had the opportunity to pursue higher education and vocational training stepped outside traditional domestic roles to challenge the male-dominated public sphere when it came to social reform.26

24 Ibid. (pp 187-204) 25 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” American Quarterly, 18:2 (Summer 1966), 151-74 and Mary Louise Roberts, “True Womanhood Revisited,” Journal of Women’s History, 14:1 (Spring 2002), 150-55. 26 For excellent discussion on nineteenth century advancements in education of women and women in the workforce, see Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Franklin Watts, 1983) and Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United 277

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Despite misreading of the cultural achievements of the Midwest by elites in other parts of the country, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Cincinnati took their cultural goals and achievements seriously: public libraries, universities, symphonies, legitimate theater performance, and art museums were found in most major cities of the Midwest by the mid-nineteenth century. In fact,

“Few cities could rival Cincinnati in the emotional energy it invested in its cultural reputation following the Civil War ….”27 A symphony orchestra, opera house, art museum and art academy all found a welcoming home in Cincinnati in the nineteenth century. Cincinnati’s art enthusiasts during the period were proponents of the English Aesthetic movement: “At the movement’s center was John Ruskin” who advocated a return to a “craftsman ideal that would restore the values of a pre-industrial, organic society.”28 This return represented resistance to the loss of individuality inherent in the Industrial Age:

… the Aesthetic movement … aimed at preserving craft skills until society could reform itself. Ruskin assumed that beauty carried moral precepts and that a restoration of beauty, of proper design, would encourage people to become more virtuous. In that light, a house was not only an individual’s castle but a moral foundation, a sanctuary from the social ills associated with the industrial city … at the center were women.29

The Aesthetic movement was the perfect complement to the cult of true womanhood. It emphasized morality, beauty, nature, and sanctuary, all attributes of domestic tranquility.30

Changes in civilizing expression, those of artistic and literary depictions of motherhood specifically, came to the forefront during this period as well. An underappreciated chronicler of the elevation of motherhood in the art world was the American expatriate painter and Cincinnati

States (Oxford University Press, 1982) and Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family from Revolution to the Present (Oxford University Press, 1980). 27 Robert C. Vitz, “Cincinnati and the Decorative Arts: The Foundations” in Cincinnati Art-Carved Furniture and Interiors, ed. Jennifer L. Howe (Ohio University Press, 2003), 3. 28 Ibid., 3-4. 29 Ibid., 4. 30 Ibid., 5. 278

24:11 native Elizabeth Nourse—not married, never a mother—yet able to successfully translate the emotion and love of a mother for her child to the canvas.

Nourse, who was Roman Catholic, grew up in the Cincinnati suburb of Mt. Healthy, so named because it was considered safe from the cholera epidemics that afflicted Cincinnati earlier in the nineteenth century. Examining Nourse’s life and work provides a valuable lens of analysis of the concerns of Cincinnatians against broader national ideas: Progressive reforms in political, social, and cultural settings. She reminds us of Cincinnati’s imprint on Progressive sensibilities, ideas about women, immigrants, children, and the working class. Elizabeth and her twin sister

Adelaide, born in 1859, were the youngest of ten children, raised in a close-knit family where money was tight.

Fig. 38 – “Elizabeth Nourse, Meditation (Sous Les Arbres), 1902, Permanent Collection, Sheldon Museum of Art.”31

Nourse was among a number of women educated at the McMicken School of Design, now the Art Academy of Cincinnati. When the school opened to students in 1869, it offered non-

31 Elizabeth Nourse, Meditation (Sous Les Arbres), (Meditation (Under the Trees)), 1902, Permanent Collection, Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska, https://emp-web- 279

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program classes, principally attended by women, and a four-year course of study that included

courses in drafting, painting, carving, and sculpture.32 It was a South Kensington Museum-model

school of art that appealed to women who saw its training potential for women artists.33 Nourse

excelled at each of the disciplines, but her favorite was painting. Women took classes and taught

classes, under the direction of renowned decorative artists such as Henry L. Fry, William H. Fry,

and Benn Pitman:

Like Pitman, the Frys believed in the appropriateness of women carving surface decorations on furniture … because of their affinity for nature and all things beautiful was a characteristic nineteenth-century belief. Women were considered to be the spiritual and moral guardians of the home … woodcarving provided a means by which women could direct the beautification of their homes, while pursuing appropriate artistic endeavors.34

Several of Elizabeth Nourse’s siblings received training at the school as well, including Louise

and Adelaide. Adelaide would go on to marry Benn Pitman, a widower, in 1871 when he was

sixty and she was twenty-two. When their parents died in 1882, Elizabeth and Louise moved to

New York to pursue additional training.

In 1887, the sisters made an artist’s pilgrimage to France, eventually choosing it as their

permanent home. Although Elizabeth traveled to Africa and throughout Europe to paint, many of

her best-loved subjects were the people of regional France, of Picardy, Normandy, and Brittany.

They were not the Parisian gentlemen and gentle ladies of France’s Third Republic. Her 1902

work Meditation (Sous Les Arbres) above, for example, depicts a young mother in quiet

95.zetcom.ch/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=11942&view Type=detailView. 32 Cecelia Scearce Chewning, “Benn Pitman and the Americanization of the Decorative Arts,” in Cincinnati Art-Carved Furniture and Interiors, 55. 33 Rachel Remmel, “‘Those Ladies of Finest Culture … Are Truly Our Working Women:’ Gender Unity, Class, Fractures, and the South Kensington Museum Model in Cincinnati, 1876-1890,” Journal of Women’s History (2017) 29:2, 133. 34 Jennifer L. Howe, “‘Love, Labour, and Enjoyment Should be Common to All’: Henry and William Fry in England and America,” in Cincinnati Art-Carved Furniture and Interiors, 38. 280

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reflection, purposefully engaged with her child. It is an ethereal impression, recovered from the

thief of time, and made tangible on canvas. Each time the work is viewed, it recreates that quiet

moment of joy, affection, and consequence:

She brought such a deep conviction to her portrayal of working people, particularly to women; to the importance of motherhood; and to the beauty found in the simplest aspects of daily life … these subjects, banal in the hands of someone less sincere and less skilled, reflected her basic values and Nourse was able to infuse them with a special sense of their importance and their universal meaning.35

The portrait below showcases another of Nourse’s most accomplished techniques, the

introduction of light from unexpected sources. The mother and her baby appear lit from above,

as if a gentle light from heaven has captured them momentarily. The mother gazes intently at her

child as she recovers a bit of strength in the quiet moment she spends contentedly studying its

sweet, peaceful face. There was “affection, but no sentimentality,” the lack of which was “one of

Nourse’s greatest attributes. Her paintings of mothers and children certainly could call for

sentiment. Lesser artists have become hopelessly bogged in it. But Nourse painted everyday

subjects as they were, matter of fact and true to life.”36 No cloying mawkishness permeated

Nourse’s work and viewers of her work appreciated the honesty of her approach to her subjects.

“Elizabeth Nourse paints in masterly fashion, but her first thought is the subject. She is an artist,

but her deepest interest is humanity, and thus in many of the pictures there is a note of universal

humanity, a homeliness which is beautiful.”37 Humanity and appreciation for the individual

35 Mary Alice Heekin Burke and Lois Marie Fink, Elizabeth Nourse, 1859-1938: A Salon Career (Smithsonian Institute Press for the National Museum of American Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum, 1983) and Vitz. 36 Margaret Josten, Enquirer Art Critic, “Local Artist Gains Fame … Again,” Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio) Thu., May 12, 1983, 46. 37 “News and Notes of Art and Artists,” Evening Star (Washington, District of Columbia), Sat. Dec. 28, 1912, 11. 281

24:11 subject were not only hallmarks of Nourse’s work, they were characteristic of her Cincinnati upbringing and early artistic training.

Fig. 39 – “Elizabeth Nourse, Une Mère (A Mother), (1888), Permanent Collection, Cincinnati Art Museum.”38

Nourse’s most famous work, Une Mère (A Mother), was painted the year after she and Louise moved to France:39

In Nourse’s day, when women were entering the workforce and public life … popular journals reassuringly extolled the ‘Modern Madonna,’ the ideal mother wholly devoted to her child. Although Nourse herself chose career over marriage, the reverence with which she instilled her imagery encouraged such readings. Here, she focuses the light on the angelic slumbering baby … [she] sympathized profoundly with the lives of working-class women who struggled to care for their families and she saw beauty in their faces and labor.40

38 Elizabeth Nourse, Une Mère (1888), in the permanent collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum. 39 Une Mère (A Mother) is also referred to as La Mère (The Mother) in several sources. 40 Une Mère, Exhibit Tombstone, Cincinnati Art Museum. 282

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Popular journals placed ideal mothers on pedestals but so did the influential leader of the English

Aesthetic movement: “Ruskin creates a notion of queenship that offers women … a powerful political and mythological model for the broadening of their scope of action, thereby redefining the traditionally domestic arena to include a broad range of philanthropy and social activism.”41

Nourse’s painting debuted at the Salon de Paris where it was selected by the all-male jury to hang “on the line,” at eye level, signifying its achievement and success, an impressive accomplishment because Nourse was an unknown in Parisian art circles at the time. The quiet strength with which Nourse imbued her works delivered an enduring emotional impact on art patrons in France and the United States.42 Among them, President Woodrow Wilson, who reportedly displayed the painting in his private White House study.43 Perhaps it served as an inspiration for the second White House conference on children’s issues that Wilson called for in

1919, discussed in further detail later in this chapter.

41 Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, “‘Be No More Housewives, but Queens’: Queen Victoria and Ruskin’s Domestic Mythology,” in Remaking Queen Victoria, ed. by Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich, 105 (Cambridge University Press, 1997) in Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez, The Valiant Woman: The Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 177. 42 Nourse became only the second woman named a member of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts (1921). She died in Paris in 1938. 43 Burke and Fink. 283

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Fig. 40 – “The Delineator, Cover, Oct. 1907.”44

Around the turn of the twentieth century, illustrations of the “New Woman” especially as

they appeared in magazines directed at a female readership, began the pilgrimage to the altar of

glamour and refinement.45 The “New Woman” was an idea that crossed social, ethnic, and

religious boundaries. But the New Woman also transcended the allure of face creams and

fashionable clothing. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued to a group of religious leaders “that it is in

the everyday that we succeed or fail as a human community.”46 With her matter-of-fact

statement, Stanton committed everyone to make positive contributions to the welfare of all in

order to ensure the success of the community at large. “Hers is a political call for social change,

and she suggests that it is in the secular that the sacred compels us to work … [she] conceived

the context of interreligious dialogue not as a neutral ground for comparison and contrast, nor a

44 The Delineator, 70:4 (Oct. 1907), Cover, HathiTrust.org, https://hdi.handle.net/2027/md39815080400420. 45 Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 61-63. 46 Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Motherhood as Metaphor: Engendering Interreligious Dialogue (Fordham University Press, 2013), 87. 284

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contest of which religion was ‘true.’ Rather … interreligious dialogue was a forum for mutual

struggles for justice and equality.”47 Crossing boundaries not only meant venturing into

unfamiliar spiritual territory, but treating such borders as permeable, where ideas could be

transmitted from one to the other and used by each for the promotion of common goals.

It was an effort at maintaining equilibrium between traditional responsibilities, new

opportunities, and aspirations. With the exception of the very poor, women at all socio-economic

levels made aspirational purchases of cosmetics, sundries, and beauty appliances.48 The full

range of their senses were engaged by the spectacle of modern department stores that offered

hard and soft goods, ready-to-wear clothing for every member of the family, and convenience

items. Purchases of these items of self-improvement and self-idealization became commonplace

among the middle and upper classes, and even among the working-class women who were

motivated through their contact with those of more significant financial means.49 They

resembled the woman depicted on the cover of the October 1907 issue of The Delineator who

was fashionably dressed, perfectly coiffed, and serene in her oversight of the small child beside

her. Such illustrations depicted women who were in total control of themselves and their

environment. Even the feral squirrel appears calm and domesticated.

Suspended between reality and the fine art depictions of working-class mothers found in

the Salon de Paris and presidential private studies, were the modern mothers who, even if they

47 Fletcher, 87-88; Also see Michèle Lamont and Viráj Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual Review Sociology (2002), 28, 167-195; and Lisa Hager, “Slumming with the New Woman: Fin-De-Siècle Sexual Inversion, Reform Work, and Sisterhood in Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina,” Women’s Writing (2007), 14:3, 460-75. 48 Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 66-70, 97-99; Leigh Summers, Bound to Please (Berg Publishers, 2003), 9-35; and Rob Schorman, Selling Style: Clothing and Social Changes at the Turn of the Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 116-26. 49 Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York (Temple University Press, 1986), 56-62.

285

24:11 did not hold a paying job outside the home, were still interested in making their home a haven for their husbands and children. The fashionable women whose images adorned the covers of magazines were the first thing women readers saw when their subscription arrived each month, but these readers spent more of their time in the pages beyond the cover. The women depicted in the articles and advertisements often looked more like the women who read the articles and made the decisions about the products to buy and the issues to support. Perhaps they envisioned themselves part of a sisterhood of mothers in the image of Nourse’s Une Mère more readily than they found communion with the glamorous ladies on the cover.

Fig. 41 – “‘Ivory Soap … 99 44/100 Per Cent Pure’ Proctor & Gamble, The Delineator, Feb. 1907.”50

Yet, these periodicals were more than just a paean to the latest fashion, they were sources of information on current events of interest to the women who balanced the domestic sphere. A perfect role for the woman’s magazine directed at the aspirational modern mother was

50 "Ivory Soap - 99 44/100 Per Cent Pure," Proctor & Gamble, Cincinnati, Ohio, The Delineator, 69:2, Feb. 1907, 3, HathiTrust.org. 286

24:11 connecting her to ideas outside her own hometown and daily life. They also motivated women interested in becoming involved in a social reform initiative or two, including that of dependent child welfare. Jennifer Burek Pierce has argued that approaches differed depending upon the magazine, but publications from Good Housekeeping to McCall’s to The Delineator “invoked motherhood as a newly political matter.”51 The scholarship on the depiction of women in magazines in the Progressive Era tends to be focused on the mundane features of the magazines as they appealed to chief consumer role of women. Scholars, including Pierce, also look at the changing roles of New Women and how those women advocated for themselves and for causes for which they were passionate. Referring to them as “sites of activism in print,” she focused on the value of these periodicals as venues of learning and of sharing ideas.52 In conversation with

Pierce, Mary Ellen Waller-Zuckerman classified these magazines as having both “led and reflected society,” in their presentation of social issues important to women and in the physical depictions of the women themselves.53

In comparison, the images of women created by Elizabeth Nourse and those on the covers of women’s magazines were dramatically different from contemporaneous photos of the

“Ziegfeld Girls,” members of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.’s troop of burlesque and Broadway beauties, and those of Charles Dana Gibson’s eponymous “Gibson Girl” portraits. Yet each validate the concept of the changing woman, whether True, Real, Public, or New. All of these images related to one another, each representing alternative opportunities for women in the Progressive Era.

Murrell (Muriel) Finlay was a Ziegfeld girl and early Hollywood actress. She was born in

51 Jennifer Burek Pierce, “Science, Advocacy, and “‘The Sacred and Intimate Things of Life’: Representing Motherhood as a Progressive Era Cause in Women’s Magazines,” American Periodicals 18:1 (2008), 70. 52 Ibid., 70-71. 53 Mary Ellen Zuckerman, A History of American Magazines, 1885-1905 (Greenwood Press, 1998), 95. 287

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Salmon, Idaho in 1902, but her beauty and ambition drove her first to New York and then to

Hollywood. Her most famous film was Sin Takes a Holiday (1930).

Fig. 42 - “Alfred Cheney Johnston, ‘Muriel Finlay,’ ca. 1920.”54

This photograph of Muriel is not quite as demure as it might appear at first glance. Her

“dress” is composed of a beaded wrap covering her arms and torso, but not entirely. The

collection of fringed wraps placed over her legs and feet and on the bench behind her suggest an

elegant dress with train, and a suggestion they remain. It is a tasteful, yet erotic image that was

not likely intended for wide public consumption, but nevertheless displays Finlay’s agency as a

woman in control of her own body and her own image. In comparison, the women who typically

sprang from the imagination of artist Charles Dana Gibson were more ephemeral beauties.

Figure 43 below is entitled The Rendezvous, and the woman depicted wearily claims her

54 “Muriel Finley,” Alfred Cheney Johnston, ca. 1920 in Robert Hudovernik, Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston (Universe: 2006) and Jewish Family Service Café Europa, “JFSNJ Café Europa Program Focuses on Ziegfeld Follies Era,” Jewish Standard, Jan. 1, 2016, https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/jfsnj-cafe-europa-program-focuses-on-ziegfeld-follies- era/. 288

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authority in relation to the viewer. Seated at a restaurant table, she waits for a companion. She is lovely, fashionably dressed, and perhaps a bit cynical as she sizes you up with her knowing, sideward glance. The typical Gibson Girl was a young woman who seemed to have few cares beyond her appearance, but this woman has lost that particular naivete. The woman of The

Rendezvous is a marked departure from that portrayal of Gibson’s characteristic carefree

ingenue. Somewhat closer to Gibson’s easily identifiable “girls” are mother and child in No Time

for Politics. In the second composition, the mother and her young daughter appear to be

admiring Gibson Girl sketches. A humorous conceit from Gibson, and certainly dismissive of the

New Woman, although the maternal “Gibson Girl” is just as lovely as her younger self.

Fig. 43 – “Charles Dana Gibson, ‘The Rendezvous,’ Fig. 44 - “Charles Dana Gibson, ‘No Time for 1909.” Politics,’ 1909.”55

55 “The Rendezvous” and “No Time for Politics,” Charles Dana Gibson, Series A – Artist’s Proof, 1909, Twelve New Gibson Girls Hitherto Unpublished, issued to annual subscribers to Collier’s magazine, from the author’s collection. 289

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Women’s magazines also cultivated an increased interest in the beauty to be found in traditional

roles that extolled the virtues of women, especially motherhood. The reading public, especially

women, were mobilized through these magazines that appealed to their intellectual appetite for

serious stories which created a role for them in effecting change, including putting additional

pressure on those in a position to put the wheels of reform into motion.56

In 1907, the Butterick Publishing Company, joined its fellow periodical publishers, a

number of which also began as dress pattern companies, in a diverse social welfare reform

crusade—each company with its own particular cause.57 Ebenezer Butterick founded his

eponymous dress pattern publishing company in the mid-nineteenth century. At the height of its

success, Butterick’s in-house physical printing plant was second in size only to that of the United

States’ Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C.58 Butterick and his competitors

capitalized on the existing periodical market with magazines that offered fashion illustrations,

and home-making advice that included cooking, decorating, cleaning, child care, and the care

and feeding of husbands. Expanding on the original vision of Louis Antoine Godey whose

Godey’s Lady’s Book put fashion and other issues in front of American women in the nineteenth

century, these magazines tapped into the undercurrent of activism among late nineteenth and

56 Waller-Zuckerman, Table 1, 717 and Table 3, 751. 57 Contemporary competitors of Butterick’s included McClure’s, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, as well as Pictorial Review, Vogue, and McCall’s, which also began as pattern book companies. Waller- Zuckerman, 724-30; Matthew Schneirov, “Popular Magazines: New Liberal Discourse and American Democracy, 1890s -1914,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2017) 16, 122-24; Sidney R. Bland, “Shaping the Life of the New Woman: The Crusading Years of the ‘Delineator,’” American Periodicals (2009) 19:2 165-188; and Jude Davies, “Women’s Agency, Adoption, and Class in Theodore Dreiser’s Delineator and Jennie Gerhardt,” Studies in American Naturalism (Winter 2017) 12:2, 141- 166. 58 Schneirov, 130-32. 290

24:11 early twentieth century women who wanted to play a role in creating and directing their own futures.59

Novelist, journalist, and activist Theodore Dreiser sat at the editorial helm of Butterick’s when it published New Idea Woman’s Magazine, Designer, and The Delineator. Dreiser accepted the role of executive editor because he “wanted to be associated with a ‘respectable’ publication which might give him the social status to which he aspired.”60 Dreiser was an alumna of the literary school of naturalism where human character is governed in large part by environmental factors. Reception of his two most popular novels, Sister Carrie and An American

Tragedy, bookended the opening decades of the twentieth century during a period when the public warmed ever so gradually to literary naturalism. Originally, his novel Sister Carrie had difficulty finding commercial or critical success. Readers were shocked by its heroine’s perceived amorality.61 His later works, however, including An American Tragedy and Jennie

Gerhardt, were greeted by an audience whose exposure to such realism vis-à-vis the gritty muckraking journalism that daily exposed business and government corruption, had helped condition them to accept such portrayals in works of fiction. Of all the muckraking exposés that filled the pages of newspapers and magazines, with the exception of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle which tackled the unsanitary and unsafe conditions in the meatpacking industry, few would stir the emotions of the reading public as much as the stories of dependent children, abandoned to the streets or locked away in heartless institutions that were little more than warehouses for innocent

59 Godey’s Lady’s Book became an important literary magazine in the late nineteenth century, offering single and serialized original works by authors such as Poe, Stowe, and Longfellow along with literary criticism. 60 Harold A. Jambor, “Theodore Dreiser, the Delineator Magazine, and Dependent Children: A Background Note on the Calling of the 1909 White House Conference,” Social Service Review, 32:1 (Mar. 1, 1958), 34. (33) 61 Ibid. 291

24:11 souls. Because Dreiser was a fluent storyteller in the grittiest of literary genres, he understood how to use his facility for driving a story. With a style that pulled few punches, he was able to unlock previously private discussions about women and domestic issues. The years Dreiser spent with Butterick Publishing allowed him to successfully smooth the edges of the stylistic gap between author of dark, naturalistic fiction and that of crusading journalist.62

It also helped develop his eye for identifying talented writers, and for deciding which of them had the power to galvanize readers to step outside the comfort of their daily existence and enter the fray to impel desired Progressive reforms forward. One of these writers was Mabel

Potter Daggett. In the following few sentences, Daggett is able to establish the harsh juxtaposition of the middle class mother looking forward to the birth of her child against the paralyzing thoughts that occupy the mind of the poor woman awaiting the birth of one of her own:

Somewhere, a little low chair and a woman rocking softly, crooning a song in a sweet undertone. Her dear fingers are fashioning tiny garments from filmy white stuffs, and always as she sews there comes to shine in her eyes the Madonna light that transfigures womanhood to motherhood. Elsewhere, a woman counting the months in dumb submission. There may be in her heart, touched by the blight of poverty, only helpless anguish at the thought of conferring life without the power to care for it. There may be more, and you read it in in her eyes, that have the look of a hunted animal at bay.63

The Delineator’s audience for this overture included the hundreds of thousands of middle-class

American women who paid the one dollar annual subscription fee for the ten monthly issues of the magazine.64 These were the familiar feelings of women who might recognize themselves in the opening lines of Daggett’s article. They were women who hoped to fulfill not only their

62 Ibid., 36. 63 Mabel Potter Daggett, “The Child Without a Home: A Cry from the Little Human Derelicts Cast Up on the Tide of Our Great Cities,” The Delineator, Vol. 70:4, 505, HathiTrust.org.05-510) 64 Waller-Zuckerman, Table 1, 717 and Table 3, 751. 292

24:11 calling, but their duty, to be “mother,” to love and care for a precious child. They were also culturally primed to feel an overwhelming empathy for the women personified in the second part of the excerpt. They gleaned from the loaded language of Daggett’s prose that even if they did not share the second woman’s circumstances or pain, they could emotionally connect to the sense of desperation and sadness that the joy they felt was not shared by every expectant mother.

It seems reasonable to assume that if Daggett got readers through that first paragraph without them putting the issue down, she had them hooked.

Mabel Potter Daggett was a graduate of Syracuse University, an experienced journalist and contributor to The New York World, Hampton’s, Pictorial Review, and Good Housekeeping before she began writing for The Delineator and this article was her first contribution to the magazine. It launched a campaign to end institutional care of orphaned children and signaled the magazine’s entry into the arena of reform activism. Historians of social structure and interaction have focused on the role of The Delineator’s child-rescue campaign to split “the category of

American motherhood into the ‘unfit’ (working class, immigrant, non-white) women induced to give up her child and the ‘fit’ (middle-class, native, white) adoptive mother.”65 This bifurcation not only served The Delineator’s narrative in championing the child welfare issue, it did so in conversation with women as mothers, social advocates, and consumers.66 Save this article and its follow-up, nothing in Daggett’s background led to child welfare as a particular area of expertise, but her narratives were rich with detail and emotional engagement. In “The Child Without a

Home: A Cry from the Little Human Derelicts Cast Up on the Tide of Our Great Cities,” Daggett explored the stories of poor, mostly immigrant, women. According to her narrative, there were

65 Emily Hainze, “Rescued Children and Unfit Mothers: Dreiser’s Social Work in the Delineator’s Child- Rescue Campaign, American Literature (2017) 89, 87 quoted in Davies, 142. 66 Davies, 142. 293

24:11 two great related evils at work in the immigrant community: the high birth rate among these women and the thousands of children sent to languish in orphan asylums. In fact, she equated the inability of these immigrant women to look forward with joyful anticipation to the birth of yet another child, to that of loveless institutional orphan care.

Echoing the humanity of Elizabeth Nourse and the artists of the Aesthetic movement, The

Delineator “embraced a Progressive reform agenda … The Delineator’s message is human betterment … its appeal is to the one great humanizing force of humanity – womanhood.”67 The

Delineator’s child rescue campaign also: “explicitly catered to nativist anxieties over ‘race suicide’ and the criminal tendencies of an ethnic underclass, proposing adoptive mothering by middle-class women as a solution to both ….”68 The Delineator’s foray into reform advocacy may have been new to its readers but its choice of child welfare and elimination of religiously administered orphan care should not have shocked those familiar with Dreiser’s opinion that decried: “… the domination of children’s homes by religious organizations, and a sensitivity to the ways that ‘charitable’ bureaucracies could sustain class-based oppression, would not have been surprising to anyone who had been following Dreiser’s career closely.”69

In fact, in the November 1896 issue of Ev’ry Month, another periodical edited by Dreiser,

“he criticized at length the orphanages and children’s homes run by religious organizations and municipal administrations … Dreiser alleged [they] were not only hopelessly corrupt but structurally inadequate.”70 No wonder he was ready to push the child rescue campaign to its most radical conclusion with the advocated closing of all orphan asylums. The Delineator’s campaign

67 “Between You and Your Editor: Personal Talks with The Delineator Family,” The Delineator, 70:3, 184 quoted in Davies, 143. 68 Davies, 154. 69 Davies, 160. 70 Ibid. 294

24:11 ultimately conflicted with the outcomes of the White House Conference: “If the appeals in The

Delineator to adopt destitute to suggested that only middle-class mothers could be good mothers, the January 1909 Conference and its aftermath assured the opposite—that working class biological mothers should be supported to raise children in their own homes.”71 The Delineator’s attitude toward immigrant mothers would soften near the end of its child-welfare reform campaign, surely a realization that its original stand ran counter to developments of mother’s pension programs.

In New York City, immigrant children had to be at least one year of age before they became public charges, registered with the city’s Bureau of Dependent Children—if they made it to that first, precious birthday.72 It was the opening decade of the twentieth century and at the height of eastern European, significantly Jewish, immigration to the United States, a point

Daggett made, in not so subtle fashion:

It is not altogether that they do not love their children. To understand their attitude … one must look at life from their point of view, from a teeming Eastside rookery on a slimy crowded street. Standing here and gazing across at the west where rise the white stone buildings that look like resplendent palaces I comparison, perhaps you might think, if little Ikey or Rachel were yours, that it would be ‘fine’ and ‘grand’ for them to live there in the ‘weisenhaus’ as the Eastside calls an institution.73

71 Davies, 166. 72 Daggett, “The Child Without a Home,” 506. 73 Ibid., 506-07. 295

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Fig. 45 – “The Way from Ellis Island Leads Right Across the City to Third Avenue.”74

She supported her narrative with snippets of “eavesdropped” conversations between bureau workers and clients. The first was a woman who workers had assisted in the past. Her exchange with the bureau agent confirmed the inherent bias of middle-class readers against immigrants as being too willing to bring more children into the world whether or not they were able to provide for them: “‘You know he always leaves you when you are in trouble. Why will you go back to that man only to bring us more children again?’ was asked her. She hung her head, ‘Sure, your honor, you know he has the winnin’ ways with him that a woman couldn’t help it.’”75 Without revealing the woman’s identity or ethnicity directly, Daggett’s clever use of dialect infers that the woman was an Irish immigrant. In New York, the Irish faced ethnic and religious bias on significant levels and so Daggett’s narrative plays to that prejudice.76 Daggett not only judged

74 Ibid., 506. 75 Ibid., 507. 76 Kai Wei, Daniel Jacobsen López, and Shiyou Wu, “The Role of Language in Anti-Immigrant Prejudice: What Can We Learn from Immigrants’ Historical Experiences?,” Journal of Social Sciences (Winter 2019), 89:3, 18, www.mdpi.com/socsci. 296

24:11 immigrant mothers, she also took on non-custodial parents, mostly fathers, who were required by statute to contribute to the care of their children.

Fig. 46 – “‘You Sent for Me,’ He Said.”77

For instance, she brought readers the case of the repeat offender, a young man with two children in care of the bureau because he claimed to be a peddler who earned just under the maximum weekly pay allowed. He did so, ostensibly, to remain exempt from having to contribute to the care of his own offspring: “‘Seven dollars a week,’ echoed the superintendent scornfully; ‘and you an able-bodied young man who ought to be out with a pick and shovel earning fifteen. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ But a departing grin indicated rather satisfaction. By cases like his, the city gets many of its children.”78 Thus, many children were left to the care of a rudimentary public welfare system that amounted to little more than warehousing of children and adolescents. The unspoken theme of Daggett’s narrative was that

77 Daggett, “The Child Without a Home,” 507. 78 Ibid. 297

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the lifestyle choices of these parents were the primary factor in determining the fate of their

children: adults producing children for whom they were unable to provide. These were not cases

of orphans created by death or disability, but, as the middle-class saw it, by ignorance and a

willful lack of socially responsible behavior.

As young Charles Loring Brace came to believe in the mid-nineteenth century, bringing

such children “under the influence of the moral and fortunate classes” via the Children’s Aid

Society was the way to stop the growth of the street rat population, the “homeless, begging,

peddling, thieving hordes of little boys and girls” he came into contact with in New York’s Five

Points District.79 The most visible program of the Children’s Aid Society was the orphan train

that moved more than 250,000 children from New York to homes in the Midwest and West.80 In

Brace’s view, these children would fill the massive void in the agricultural labor market and

would “absorb the morality of agrarian life” in the process.81 The orphan trains offered a win-

win solution for immigrant inundated middle-class New Yorkers, the Midwestern and Great

Plains farmers, and ostensibly for the orphans themselves. “Nobody would lose under this

system, according to Brace; the children would receive moral training, New Yorkers would be

rid of their potentially dangerous children, and the rural citizens would receive much needed

farm hands.”82 Eventually, the very nature of the Children’s Aid Society succumbed to

79 Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work among Them, 3rd ed. (Wynkoop and Hallenbeck, 1880), ii and Stephen O’Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (University of Chicago Press, 2004), 72-82 quoted in Paul J. Ramsey, “Wrestling with Modernity: Philanthropy and the Children’s Aid Society in Progressive-Era New York City,” New York History 88:2 (Spring 2007), 153. 80 Ramsey, 154. 81 Brace, Dangerous Classes, 225 and Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Kentucky Press, 1975), 132-56 quoted in Ramsey, 154. 82 Brace, Dangerous Classes, 225; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 28-32; Children’s Aid Society, The Crusade for Children: A Review of Child Life in New York during 75 Years, 1853-1928 (n.d.) 14-21 quoted in Ramsey, 154. 298

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Progressive Era reforms, as the “Protestant morality [that] was the overarching mission of the society” in its early years, gave way to “new ideas about the nature of childhood, education, and, of course, philanthropy.”83

Daggett quickly returned to the image of the helpless babes and their mothers who relied on the foundling hospitals, institutions where newborns were anonymously deposited for care.

The sad truth was that foundling hospitals often provided palliative care only, making these littlest orphans comfortable, if possible, before their almost certain deaths. New York City was home to four such foundling homes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the days before manufactured baby formula, many of these babies simply died of starvation. Although immigrant women, usually Italians, were paid by the city to wet-nurse infants, there were not enough of them willing to wet-nurse the city’s foundlings when they were able to make more money as wet-nurses in private homes.84 That fact alone pulled persuasively at the maternal heart-chords of middle-class women across the country who had nursed their own children through the first years of life: “You, O mother! Who are rocking your baby to sleep, I think you will know when you remember that there are thirty thousand in New York going to sleep with no one to tuck them in tenderly.”85 The soloist finished her warm-ups and lip trills, the conductor tapped his baton on the music stand, the orchestra was at the ready, the concert was about to begin. This was an opus that began with a familiar melody. Concurrent with the ascendance of the middle class, mothers replaced fathers as domestic authority figures. “Employing a method of socialization that used a child’s close emotional ties to the mother as a pawn in a game of conformity and passivity … Put simply, love had vanquished force and authority, the female had

83 Ramsey, 156. 84 Daggett, “The Child Without a Home,” 508-09. 85 Ibid., 510. 299

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replaced the male, in the social relations of childrearing.”86 Every mother knew the words by

heart.

In a journalistic duet, The Delineator published a second, related article in the November

1907 issue that presented a variation on the crisis of orphans, “The Home Without a Child,” by

Lydia Kingsmill Commander, an “expert” on race suicide. Commander was a wife, mother of

five, and author of a recently published book: An American Idea: A Study of Race Suicide

(1907). Race suicide was a theory based partly in xenophobia, partly in scientific racism, and one

hundred percent in fearmongering. It was also a byproduct of the eugenics movement. The central theory of race suicide was that the birth rate among native-born American Protestant women decreased precipitously in the nineteenth century, just as the birth rate among immigrant

Catholic women increased exponentially. Even Theodore Roosevelt, in his speech before the

National Congress of Mothers (1905), argued:

… if the average family in which there are children contained only two children, the nation as a whole would decrease in population so rapidly that in two or three generations it would very deservedly be on the point of extinction, so that the people who had acted on so base and selfish a doctrine would be giving place to others with broader and more robust ideals. Nor would such a result be in any way creditable; for the race that practiced such a doctrine, the race that practiced race suicide, would thereby conclusively show that it was unfit to exist, and that it had better give place to people who had not forgotten the primary law of healthy well- being.87

86 Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1856 (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 159 quoted in Jodi Vandenberg-Daves, “Twentieth-Century American Motherhood: Promises, Pitfalls, and Continuing Legacies,” The American Historian (Nov. 2016), https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2016/november/twentieth-century-american-motherhood-promises- pitfalls-and-continuing-legacies/. Also see Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (Monthly Review Press, 1985), 124-126; and Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1994), 125 quoted in Vandenberg-Daves. 87 Theodore Roosevelt, Speech, “Report of the National Congress of Mothers: Held in the City of Washington, D.C., March 10-17, 1905,” (The National Congress of Mothers, 1905), 85. 300

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At a time when immigrant families swelled the population of cities, white middle-class families were shrinking in size. City and suburban families no longer required large families to assist with farm duties or home-work for family survival.88 Roosevelt spoke of a threat to the “average

family,” read: white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, if birth rates remained low in future

generations. Such imagery encapsulated the rhetoric of race suicide. In his concluding sentence

to this particular excerpt, Roosevelt in effect challenges the manhood of white men with an

observation that any race that did not adequately ensure its future survival through vigorous

reproduction did not deserve to exist.

The National Congress of Mothers first met in 1897. The meeting at which Roosevelt

delivered this address, held March 10-17, 1905, was the ninth such meeting. The published

report of the 1905 Congress opened with the following poem by social reformer Albert Osborn:

The Mothers’ Congress

Hail, lovers of the lore of motherhood! In wide exchange of home-made wisdom wise, In search of truth with keen, wide-open eyes, Your coming augurs for the common good.

Home-makers and home-guardians ye have stood And helped successive generations rise; In storm and stress have given smiles, not sighs; In potent patience “have done what you could.”

Come, pilgrim mothers, from your households bright, With patriot purpose and for children’s weal; Come on in phalanx strong in faith and prayer. Converge your thousand rays of hearthstone light Till all our homes its radiant warmth shall feel And earth with love at work be sweet and fair.89

88 Peter N. Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History (Westview Press, 2012), 170-72. 89 Albert Osborn, “The Mothers’ Congress,” Report of the National Congress of Mothers (National Congress of Mothers: 1905), 6. Osborn was the biographer of John Fletcher Hurst, the first chancellor of American University. 301

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This three stanza ode to mothers is notable for its recollection of the tropes of republican

motherhood: “home guardians,” “pilgrim mothers,” “with patriot purpose.” The call goes out to

American mothers to join the congress in order to claim their role in bringing the “radiant

warmth” and “hearthstone light” to every home. It is an appeal to political action, but also to

acting as role models for other women. This was an invocation meant for native-born American women to proselytize among the immigrant classes and the working poor to be the heroines of their own homes.

Commander’s book explored how the drop in the birth rate among (Protestant)

Americans was exacerbated by “the immigration phase … (that) is even more serious than the extreme limitation of the size of the family.”90 In the Delineator article, her primary concern was

that in the 1900 United States Census, only eighteen million children were counted, seven

million fewer than if American citizens continued to have children at the rate of their great-

grandparents: “Seven million babies missing! Send out the crier – ‘Lost to America between

great-grandmother’s day and ours, seven million little children!’”91 This she blamed on society

which had come to devalue large family size at the same time immigrants were bringing large

families to the United States, a perfect storm in the eyes of race suicide alarmists. She

simultaneously called out “university economists for their crusade against children” in which

they widely publicized the costs to raise a child: “twenty-five thousand for boys, half as much for a girl.”92 She topped off all of this with a remonstration of:

the modern woman, in this age of reason, [who] has come to count the cost of motherhood and her husband counts it with her. The reckoning, as they read it, runs very high. What they do not count, because it cannot be written down in

90 Lydia Kingsmill Commander, An American Idea: A Study of Race Suicide (A. S. Barnes & Company, 1907), 226, HathiTrust.org. 91 Commander, “The Home Without a Child,” The Delineator, Nov. 1907, 70:5, 720. (830) 92 Ibid. Theoretically, the amount spent on girls was half as much because more was appropriate to invest in a boy’s education. 302

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figures, and no scientist has ever told it, is the return wealth that comes with the child … In the face of this overcaution (sic) that shuts so many children out of homes of comfort, how strange sounds the tragic story of the host of homeless children that was told in the October Delineator!93

In Commander’s analysis, her contemporaries who chose a small family size, or chose not to

have children at all, were motivated to familial limitation by arguments that the costs of raising a

child, or children, were exorbitant and unsustainable. What they did not account for in this

enumeration of the cost of parenthood, reasoned Commander, was the value of the benefits of

having children, that benefit associated with the love and affection between children and parents

that carried no assessable financial value, because it was, in fact, a priceless asset. This affection

was not limited, according to Commander, to children born into the family, but also those chosen

to join the family through adoption. This part of The Delineator’s campaign was designed to

quicken the pulse of the American people and to inspire action to contribute, to adopt, to foster,

to look at their own children with a renewed sense of wonder and joy, and be thankful, no matter

the financial cost, for the privilege of raising children. In fact, The Delineator proposed that families expanding through adoption had the potential to solve two problems with a single campaign.94

Adoption was an infrequent outcome of orphan care in the mid-nineteenth century. Many

children who were admitted to orphanages as full orphans during the nineteenth century

remained in the custody of the facility until they reached its age of dismissal, which varied from

institution to institution. One such orphan was James E. West, a key player in the efforts to bring

the White House Conference to fruition. West was a founder of the National Child-Rescue

League, and its secretary. He had first-hand experience with the challenges of an institutional

93 Ibid., 723. 94 Ibid., 724. 303

24:11 childhood. West was raised in an orphanage in Washington, D.C. after the death of both of his parents, his father before he was born and his mother within a few months of his birth. As an adult, he became a passionate advocate for the children who had few voices to speak on their behalf. There were approximately 100,000 dependent children in institutions across the nation at the turn of the twentieth century just as America’s support for the Waisenhaus institutional childcare system waned.95 Institutional child-saving began to lose the battle for public opinion with reformers who had come to advocate for cottage settings and foster care.

President Roosevelt appointed West to the Board of Pension Appeals for the District of

Columbia and West later became Assistant Attorney of the Department of the Interior. West was among a small group of young, like-minded bureaucrats within Roosevelt’s circle. He and the president also had a unique personal connection. Both had been sickly children, with physical limitations that impacted childhood vitality although each transcended these early challenges to achieve positions of authority, in which vigor was an attribute.96 West was the poster child—the true believer critical to implementing the vision of reform—because he spoke from the heart about his own experience to those with the power to make change. The year after the photo below was taken, West was named the “temporary” Chief Executive of the Boy Scouts of

America. He held the job for 32 years.

95 Crenson, 114-46 and Nurith Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Temple University Press, 1989), 180-85. 96 Crenson, 9. 304

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Fig. 47 – “‘Jas. E. West,’ ca. 1910.”97

According to historian Matthew Crenson, a newly married West began “moonlighting for

The Delineator” in 1907.98 The following summer, he represented The Delineator at the twenty- fifth annual meeting of the National Home Finding Society, held in Chicago. Upon his return to

Washington, he wrote Roosevelt to try to interest him in the care of dependent children as an issue. When West and Dreiser visited the president in October of that year, West suggested that the president host a national conference “as a way to ‘greatly advance the cause of the dependent child.’”99 West followed up his personal request with a letter cosigned by representatives of the

New York Charities Aid Association, the Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society, the Russell

Sage Foundation, the St. Vincent de Paul Society, the Boston Children’s Aid Society, as well as

Prof. Edward Devine, who was the editor of Charities and the Commons, Theodore Dreiser, and

97 “Jas. E. West” (ca. 1910), Bain Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2014700492/. 98 Ibid., 10. 99 “The Story of the White House Conferences on Children and Youth,” Children’s Bureau (United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1967), 3. See also Wentworth, 17-20; Richardson 379; and Lewandowski 20-22. 305

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Judge Julian W. Mack of the Circuit Court of Illinois.100 In the letter, he stated, in part: “The problem of the dependent child is acute; it is large; it is national. We believe that it is worthy of national consideration. We earnestly hope, therefore, that you will cooperate in an effort to get this program before the American people …”101 West’s emphatic, principled entreaties were the link between the emotion-fueled efforts of The Delineator and the natural exuberance of

President Roosevelt who later stated:

Each child represents either a potential addition to the protective capacity and enlightened citizenship of the nation or, if allowed to suffer from neglect, a potential addition to the destructive forces of a community … The interests of the nation are involved in the welfare of this array of children no less than in our great material affairs.102

Without much effort, West convinced Roosevelt to support the conference. The president’s natural proclivities were to ambulate the can-do American spirit, for the benefit of the children certainly, but also for the future contributions of these children to the American experience as a whole. Within the scope of Roosevelt’s worldview this was an easy decision. Children could be guided down the road of productive achievement and good citizenship or be left to carom from pillar to post, looking for guidance and affection amongst the meanest of circumstances, aligning themselves with the negative because no one offered a positive alternative.

Reformers exerted effort at a number of pressure points in the system to persuade the

American public and its elected representatives to overcome the shortfalls of institutional child welfare. Behind the scenes, child welfare reform advocates used their connections to those in power to put the issue at the top of the list of presidential priorities. For example, they contacted

100 Children’s Bureau, 5. 101 Ibid., 4. 102 Theodore Roosevelt, “Special Message to the Senate and House of Representatives,” dated Feb. 15, 1909, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-334. See also Wentworth, 63-69; Richardson, 378; and Lewandowski 27-30. 306

24:11 people of influence within all levels of government, local, state, and federal. They wrote letters, some of which were published in women’s magazines, and most of which were likely filed away, unseen by the intended recipient. Over conversation and cups of tea, they decided on a plan to reach out to the powerful who could ensure progress did not stall. The president did his part by calling together an impressive group of Americans from across the child welfare reform spectrum.

Stakeholders convened within thirty days of the president’s invitation, and quickly produced a list of action items for legislators. Items agreed upon before the conference even began included:

(i) Children of worthy parents or deserving mothers should, as a rule, be kept with their parents at home; (ii) The effort should be made to eradicate causes of dependency, such as disease and accident, and to substitute compensation and insurance for relief; (iii) Homeless and neglected children, if normal, should be cared for in families, when practicable; (iv) Institutions should be on the cottage plan with small units, as far as possible; (v) Agencies caring for dependent children should be incorporated, on approval of a suitable state board; (vi) The State should inspect the work of all agencies which care for dependent children; (vii) Educational work of institutions and agencies caring for dependent children should be supervised by state educational authorities; (viii) Complete histories of dependent children and other parents, based upon personal investigation and supervision, should be recorded for guidance of child-caring agencies; (ix) Every needy child should receive the best medical and surgical attention, and be instructed in health and hygiene; (x) Local child-caring agencies should cooperate and establish joint bureaus of information; (xi) Prohibitive legislation against transfer of dependent children between States should be repealed; (xii) A permanent organization for work along the lines of these resolutions is desirable; and (xiii) Establishment of a federal children’s bureau is desirable, and enactment of (the) pending bill is earnestly recommended.103

The first two recommendations called for families to be kept together and to eliminate remediable poverty, either by providing mother’s pensions, in the case of death or desertion of the child’s father, or disability insurance/worker’s compensation in the case of illness or injury.

103 Proceedings of the Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, Held at Washington, D.C., January 25, 26, 1909 (United States Government Printing Office, 1909), 16. 307

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Foster care was to be used for children who could not live with their own parents. Institutions should move to the cottage system, limiting the size of housing units to just 25 or 30 children.

All institutions providing care should be incorporated, licensed, inspected, and supervised by their local state authorities. The Children’s Bureau should be approved to collect and maintain data on children who had become dependent in the state by virtue of death, desertion, or poverty.

The local child-care agencies should cooperate for the good of the children. States should repeal legislation that prohibit orphaned children from being relocated there and finally, every child should be given access to medical and dental care, and instructed in proper hygiene.104

The two-day White House Conference on Care of Dependent Children was held January

25 and 26, 1909. Two weeks before the meeting, Roosevelt appointed West, Homer C. Folks, the

New York City Commissioner of Public Charities, and Thomas M. Mulry, president of the national office of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, to a committee responsible for making preliminary arrangements for the conference, including featured speakers responsible for introducing each of the propositions, and to prepare a program and rules that would govern the proceedings.105 These rules included not only having pre-selected speakers introduce the propositions, but pre-selected speakers to support the proposition, and alternating chairmen for each session to recognize speakers from the floor.106 The committee selected the locations for each of the four sessions. Locations included the White House and the Willard Hotel.

Among the more than two hundred men and women invited (the overwhelming majority of whom attended) were: Jane Addams, C. Loring Brace, Jr. and his brother Robert, Andrew

Carnegie, Theodore Dreiser, Jacob Riis, Lillian Wald, and Dr. Samuel Wolfenstein

104 Ibid. 105 Ibid., 19. 106 Ibid. 308

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(superintendent of the JOA).107 Conference attendees represented members of the Catholic,

Jewish, and Protestant faiths. It is significant that representatives of each of America’s major religions were represented at the conference as a show of the interfaith commitment to resolving these issues. In addition, Booker T. Washington, founder and President of Tuskegee Institute, and representatives from institutions that cared for African American children were also in attendance. This inclusivity was in opposition to other cultural and social gatherings of the day, in particular, the Chautauqua Society enclave and regional Methodist camp meetings that elevated Protestant Christianity over Judaism and Catholicism. In response to the isolated segregation of Chautauqua, similarly-styled adult education lyceums were organized by Jews and

Catholics.108 The majority of participants in the White House conference were involved in charity work, orphan care, or the juvenile justice system, as well as a few members of state and local governmental bodies. Several of the attendees came from the Midwest including

Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapolis, although those from

New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., dominated the proceedings. Huge geographic areas of the country had no representation at all but the majority of attendees logically came from areas with significant populations. Notably, the Midwest was second only to the cities of the East in terms of representatives invited.

107 “List of Invitees,” Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 20-31. 108 Andrew C. Rieser, The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 2003), 120-27. 309

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Fig. 48 – “Official Conference Photo - Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, Jan. 25-26, 1909.”109

The conference opened with the remarks from a number of the participants, including the president. The official proceedings validated the opening session’s interpersonal dynamics that reflected the hope that these individuals were on their best behavior, typical of the rules of decorum that were appropriate for the day, and the occasion. As the proceedings unfolded, however, allegations of a lack of care, and even of earnestness, began to fracture a united front.

Richard Crane, Secretary Particular of the Council of the St. Vincent de Paul Society of

Cincinnati, spoke on the first day about the concerns of religious institutions, focusing on government oversight of child protection charities:

… we have the already well-established charities instituted and with considerable success carried out by various minor organizations amongst us. Foremost probably are those undertaken by the various religious bodies. There are also notable private endowments by philanthropic men and women. Most of these … in one way or the other are chartered institutions, and as such are supposed to carry on their work with the approval and knowledge of the commonwealth in which they labor … it would seem unnecessary for the State to bother itself with the internal economy of such bodies as long as the effects of their work are not calculated to impede or to destroy the general well-being … if they are mistaken, it is not to the State they are responsible, but to a higher tribunal. If their means are inefficacious they will die a natural death; if their methods be fraudulent or

109 “Official Conference Photo,” Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 3. 310

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scandalous the State will soon be able to deal with them as with any other criminals.110

Crane knew that in Cincinnati, for example, Catholic charities were part of a millennia-old hierarchy with multiple, complex layers of authority above them. He felt that these charities, especially ones directed at the welfare of children, already faced a level of scrutiny that no secular government was able to match and so to institute control by a federal agency over the day-to-day operations of sectarian charities in cities across the country was unnecessary.

Theoretically, his opinion that mid-sized cities like Cincinnati with church-based controls already in place, applied to places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and New

Orleans, as well.111 Crane’s assessment was that federal oversight was a one-size-fits-all solution that swamped the charitable efforts in mid-size and small cities that had not experienced problems on the scale of those in New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, with additional reporting requirements. If direct intervention in institutions in large metropolitan areas where there were problems with graft, overcrowding, and mistreatment were necessary, he argued, by all means, proceed. He also contended that if a charity had inherent issues that negatively impacted its mission, it was likely either to collapse under the weight of its own inefficiencies or was held to account according to existing law, just as if there were a case of criminality:

110 “Remarks of Mr. Richard Crane, Secretary Particular, Council St. Vincent De Paul Society, Cincinnati,” Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 126-27. 111 Catharine Esther Beecher, “The Evils Suffered by American Women, and American Children: The Causes and the Remedy: Presented in an Address by Miss C.E. Beecher: to Meetings of Ladies in Cincinnati, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Other Cities: Also an Address to the Protestant Clergy of the United States (Harper & Brothers, 1846); David J. Endres, “‘Without Guide, Church, or Pastor’: The Early Catholics of Cincinnati, Ohio” Ohio Valley History (2018) 18:4, 3-22; John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); Joseph H. Lackner, “Dan A. Rudd, Editor of the ‘American Catholic Tribune,’ from Bardstown to Cincinnati,” The Catholic Historical Review (1994) 80:2, 258-81; and Gary B. Agee, A Cry for Justice: Daniel Rudd and His Life in Black Catholicism, Journalism and Activism, 1854-1933 (University of Arkansas Press, 2011). 311

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Their methods are the outgrowth of many centuries of experience; their means, generally the generosity of individuals. They are directly amenable to the church authorities, who inspect with a minuteness that can be possible only in the spiritual order … I would deem it highly impracticable nay socialistic for the State to care for those who might properly be called orphans, or even waifs, is not altogether clear … that it should cooperate is far clearer. But in cooperation there is not included the right to direct to the extent of asking for an account of what may be done by those who transgress no just law.”112

Crane took the position that oversight of religious institutional childcare was best handled by the higher authority to which the individuals who ran the institutions had committed their lives. He continued to advocate for orphan care by the Mother Church rather than by the state. He called for cooperation between church and state, but not for authority of the state over the church when the church had not broken any “just laws.” In that moment, Crane sought to prevent legislation that would grant the state unlimited authority to control church-sponsored orphan care from being an outcome of the conference. He looked with suspicion at the proposed federal intervention in the process. He concluded his remarks with a statement rich with Midwestern sensibility and common sense:

Home does not consist in a couple that live in a house together, nor in a ward who has never excited in its would-be mother the yearning of flesh and blood. Do not imagine that I oppose adoption – far from it – in a sense it is the most beautiful of this kind, that is, the saving of children. But here, too, how many difficulties beset us – religion, condition, environment, etc. And how would the State keep track of all these things? … Here, too, the State will have to trust its well-meaning citizens, without multiplying petty laws, which would make automatons of them.113

In Crane’s opinion, good intentions of functionaries do not necessarily mean that bureaucratic oversight is always the best solution to a problem. Crane warned of the dehumanizing impact of overregulation on all parties involved in the care of orphans: the children, the caregivers, the

112 Ibid., 127-28. 113 Ibid., 128. 312

24:11 administrators, and the state employees whose job it would be to implement laws that served no practical purpose in ensuring the well-being of the children.

To more progressive-minded reformers, especially those like West with personal experiences in the child-saving system, Crane’s words spawned an intense level of anxiety. After additional speakers opined on the problems they saw with proposed federal oversight, West rose to speak:

I have been greatly disappointed at the discussions this morning. We seem to forget the conditions which confront us. Probably because every one (sic) here is willing to agree to this proposition it has been seen fit by some speakers to dwell upon the stumbling blocks in the road of doing what we want this conference to indorse (sic) … The great difficulty about this proposition as it impressed itself on me, as I have made a study of the subject and have been working in it so actively, is that there is a failure on the part of some very well-meaning people to realize fully the modern thought on this subject …114

West’s first complaint was that everyone felt it necessary to point out the obstacles to achieving the various goals of the conference, even though they had already agreed to the proposals at the outset of the conference. His plea was to move beyond pointing out potential difficulties to begin to implement the plan. His second complaint was that some of the attendees were not willing to accept that their ways of doing things, i.e., the old-fashioned way, was no longer desired, or even acceptable. Time had moved on, and they could move with it or be left behind. In other words, those of you in the middle of the country who have not recognized the markers of progress, I know you have good intentions, but you are behind the times, unlike those of us who are cognizant of all the latest information on child welfare reform. He continued: “We do not want to destroy the institution, we do not want to have our consideration of this topic interpreted as an attack upon the institution; but we would like to have it interpreted as a plea for increased

114 Ibid., 134-35. 313

24:11 facilities for doing placing-out work.”115 Except that some did want to destroy the institution, including the conference organizers, in order to completely remake the child welfare delivery system. The fact that the participants had already agreed to the general proposition on the establishment of a children’s bureau did not mean that they were in lockstep on every nuance and recommendation percolating just under the ostensibly cordial surface of the conference proceedings.

In the afternoon session of the first day of the conference, Lillian Wald spoke briefly on what seemed to be a major sticking point of the morning session, the idea that the conference lead to the creation of yet another charitable society to direct children’s affairs at a national level:

“The air is murky with many organizations, and sad is the fact that the same people are so frequently called upon to devote themselves to so many different phases of social endeavor.”116

No matter the era, or issue, there were those who volunteered—and those who let them:

For that reason, inasmuch as it might confuse the issue that we may agree upon. I should discourage the suggestion of creating another society and focus all of our attention, if possible, upon making the Government itself responsible for informing and giving education to all of the people who are already interested in the children and to stimulate those communities that have not expressed themselves forcibly as yet for the children.”117

Wald wanted to clarify that what was called for was government intervention at the national level with the creation of a children’s bureau, not the organization of a national charitable oversight board that would detour efforts, or more importantly, financial support, away from existing philanthropies. It was up to the federal government to lead efforts to educate the

American people about the needs of dependent children and to motivate those communities that

115 Ibid., 135. 116 “Remarks of Miss Lillian D. Wald, Member National Child Labor Committee,” Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 171. 117 Ibid. 314

24:11 had not yet stepped up to assist vulnerable children to do so. Her comments were greeted with a round of applause, but a few minutes later, Hugh Fox, President of the State Board of Children’s

Guardians of the State of New Jersey, stood to weigh in on the discussion. The intent of his comments may have mirrored those of other attendees from various state and municipal child- welfare agencies, but they were heavy with condescension, an approach that rubbed many the wrong way:

I am sorry I have not heard all of the discussion this afternoon, but I want to emphasize Miss Wald’s argument … there are already a number of national organizations in existence which are dealing with the child problem. For example, there is the National Child Labor Committee, the National Play Ground Movement, the General Alliance of Workers with Boys; there is a national organization to consider the problems of backward and defective children; a movement has been recently organized in connection with school hygiene; the boys’ club workers of the Y.M.C.A. for their own national association. There is a National Association for Industrial Education, a National Human Alliance, and a national association of the various children’s home societies. Now comes this proposition to form another national organization which shall not be a combination of all these interests, but will be a new movement to deal with dependent children. Unless its financial status is well assured at the start I question the wisdom of it, and in any case it must not be allowed to weaken the movement for a federal children’s bureau.118

Fox enumerated the variety of existing organizations founded to provide resources to address

“the child problem,” ad nauseum. While he threw out name upon name of worthy philanthropies, committees, councils, and alliances that tackled some facet of American child-saving efforts, he neglected the area that concerned conference attendees the most, that of dependent children. Like other conference participants from the ranks of organizations without direct responsibility for the care of dependent children, Fox supported the creation of a federal children’s bureau, as long as it did not interfere with the charitable organizations’ status quo. It is impossible to miss the impassioned tone of James West that jumped from the page of the conference proceedings as he

118 “Remarks of Hugh F. Fox, President of the State Board of Children’s Guardians of the State of New Jersey,” `Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 172. 315

24:11 rose from his chair to respond to Fox: “I would be false to my colors, false to my feelings and principles, if I did not stand upon this floor and resent most respectfully and earnestly the statement of the gentleman from New Jersey.”119 His remonstrations of Fox and like-minded philanthropic functionaries was measured, but his message was clear, you are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts:

The very purpose of this conference is to call the attention of the world to the fact that the dependent child has been neglected. We have legislated and we have provided and improvised for the delinquent child, and for all other classes of work, and yet he gets up on this floor and tells us we have all these organizations for caring for these other classes of children, and that therefore there is no reason for any organization especially devoted to advancing the interests of the poor little boy who is classed as a dependent child. I protest as a boy who was dependent, and a boy who has always been very grateful for the opportunities that were given to him by good people during his dependency. In keeping with the advancements of this age, there is necessity not only for the dissemination of knowledge, which would be the proper function of the children’s bureau, but for, in some cases, an active propaganda.120

Having once been a dependent child, West was intimately familiar with the lives of dependent children. While his experience had been positive, on balance, and while he was grateful for the fact that good people had watched out for him, not every dependent child could count on being so lucky. That was the point of the conference, whether men like Fox chose to recognize it or not. The conference proceedings are silent on Fox’s response. It is conjecture to assert that Fox sat stone-faced and unable to rise from his chair, or stormed from the ballroom in hot indignation at having been called to account by West, but we can imagine that he was not oblivious to

West’s ardent, and pointed reply. A few minutes later, the chair recognized James F. Jackson, the

Superintendent of Cleveland’s Associated Charities, who made an impassioned plea for cooperation in light of the previous series of exchanges:

119 James E. West, “Remarks of James E. West, Washington, D.C., Secretary National Child-Rescue League,” Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 174. 120 Ibid. 316

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… my observation at last, has not shown that the representatives of the various child-caring organizations were the most anxious of all charity people to work together. If the children’s societies can actually and genuinely cooperate in a way that shall be helpful to one another, why in Heaven’s name can not (sic) the rest of us do the same.121

Jackson admonished his fellow charitable umbrella organization representatives for their

combativeness. Those who, in effect, had the most to lose from the changes the conference

attendees proposed were being reasonable and cooperative. Jackson’s comments were met with

applause from the participants, but his call for cooperation did not survive even until the

adjournment of the second day’s afternoon session. In essence, many of the participants weighed

in to make sure that their particular peeve was recognized in the official record. For example,

frequent contributor to the “Letters to the Editor” page of The Delineator, W. B. Sherrard,

Superintendent of the National Children’s Home Society, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, rose to

highlight the peculiar position of the West as an end-of-the-line dumping ground for orphans

from the East:

… as one who has brought children by the hundred into the Western States and placed them in homes, I will say this, that we of the West have been forced to put up the bars to protect ourselves from the poor work of the East. Children have been sent in there without any supervision, no watching, no care, and they drifted into our reform schools … Now you eastern people must not expect to use the West as a dumping ground on any proposition like that [Laughter] It is reciprocity and fair play for which we ask. You are responsible for the fact that in the Western States at the present time there is practically prohibitory legislation against their (orphaned children) coming in.122

Sherrard chose during his turn to speak to accuse orphan care institutions in the East who out-

placed children to foster care and employment settings in the West for dumping unsupervised

121 “Remarks of James F. Jackson, Cleveland, Superintendent Associated Charities,” Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 182. 122 “Remarks of W. B. Sherrard, Sioux Falls, S. Dak., Superintendent National Children’s Home Society,” Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 188-89. 317

24:11 children in western states, thereby creating a problem for others as they relieved themselves of the responsibility for the children’s safety and welfare.

C. Loring Brace, Jr. of the New York Children’s Aid Society, and son of its founder (and of the orphan train movement), stood to respond to Sherrard. He made clear that the society had secured $25,000 surety bonds on file in several western states to prevent children sent west from becoming public charges, burdens on the citizens of the states to which they were sent. His primary complaint seemed to be that although Sherrard did not specifically name the Children’s

Aid Society, everyone knew who he meant. He added, gratuitously, that Children’s Aid was only sending Protestant children west: “The Children’s Aid Society, which cooperates with all

Protestant institutions, is the only society sending children West among the Protestants, the

Foundling Society is the only society sending children West as far as that among Catholics.”123

Brace’s identification of Catholics and the Foundling Society begs an interesting question: Who were the stakeholders missing from this conference? They were those with significant experience on the front lines of child welfare and work with the poor: the Catholic nuns and priests who operated hundreds of orphanages across the country. Of the twenty priests or members of the Catholic laity in attendance at the conference who were associated with

Catholic Charities and child welfare organizations: one was a Christian Brother, three were

Jesuits, and sixteen were the laity and clerics affiliated with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.

The heavy attendance of St. Vincent de Paul representatives was not a surprise in that one of the original signatories to the letter to President Roosevelt was Thomas Mulry, President of the

National Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and member of the conference’s arrangements committee. Yet, there were no representatives from the front lines of dependent child-care from

123 “Remarks of Charles Loring Brace, Jr., New York, Secretary Children’s Aid Society,” Conference on Care of Dependent Children, 191. 318

24:11 the orders of women religious. Of the 90,000 plus children in orphanages in the United States at the time, nearly two-thirds, or 60,000, were in Catholic institutions.124 These were overwhelmingly women who had devoted their lives to the care of orphaned children. The institutions were the physical manifestations of their individual and collective missions in service to God. There were no Ursulines, no Sisters of Notre Dame, no Sisters of Mercy, to represent the voices of the women whose selfless efforts for children were about to be shelved.

Later that evening, President Roosevelt arrived at the Willard Hotel to deliver his remarks at the closing dinner for the Conference, part thank you and part reminder to embrace the spirit of cooperation for the sake of the children who relied on the participants to put aside petty disagreements and territorial disputes:

It is a great pleasure to me to come here this evening and congratulate you upon the amount of work that you have done, and I need hardly say that its value is immeasurably increased because it represents your unanimous judgment ... I am particularly pleased at the way in which you have been able to act in harmony, at the excellent feeling that has prevailed, among the very earnest, very zealous men and women it is not always that one finds the saving grace of common sense; and this body stands in startling contrast to some other most well-meaning and philanthropic bodies in having shown so much of that homely and indispensable quality … I congratulate you upon the progressive and constructive character of the platform to the outline of which I have just listened.125

This opening set of remarks from the president reflected his overt attempt to chide the participants into maintaining a united front once the conference adjourned by praising them in advance for doing that very thing. First, he congratulated them on their unanimity in spite of the fact there were multiple personal agendas. He expressed presidential appreciation for their consonance of action because the efforts were so critically important. He also commended them

124 Marion J. Morton, “The Transformation of Catholic Orphanages: Cleveland, 1851-1996” The Catholic Historical Review 88:1 (Jan. 2002), 72-73. 125 “Remarks of Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States,” Proceedings of the Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 213. 319

24:11 for their commitment to common sense. Most significantly, he recognized that the conference proposals exceeded the benchmark for Progressive action. Having spoken enthusiastically in praise, his tone hardened ever so slightly, to preemptively warn the participants to be on their best behavior going forward:

Now, I do not think that is necessary for me to say what I am about to say, and yet on the off chance of its being necessary I shall say it: that at no time has any responsible person in this meeting, or persons responsible for the organization of this meeting, referred to those engaged in any form of child-saving work, and especially to members of the board of directors of institutions, save in a temper and spirit that recognized in the fullest degree the good done by those men and the good that they aim to accomplish … We are not attacking good men and good women who did so much in the past, or the good man and good woman who are engaged in trying to do good along the same old ways, when we advocate an improvement in the ways … It is no assault upon the captains of hundreds and the captains of tens who still naturally cling to the weapons of their youth when we advocate an improvement in the instruments with which we strive to meet the evil in the conditions of to-day.126

In other words, “I shouldn’t have to remind you, but here we are, and just in case, I’m going to say it anyway.” Using the same common sense that he would call on the conference participants to employ, Roosevelt reminded them that “old” did not mean “bad” and that it was not necessary, or appropriate, to impugn the motives of those using the methods about to be thrown in the dust bin of social welfare programming. To those whose methods were to be displaced by Progressive practices, he offered that the transformations to come were not personal attacks but opportunities for them to join the united efforts to defeat the social conditions that placed the children they cared about at risk. With his own particular brand of wit and wisdom, Roosevelt cautioned against sacrificing the good enough for the perfect:

If there is any one quality, if there is any one failing against which it is necessary that a philanthropist should always be on his or her guard, it is the failing of permitting the avoidance of hardness of heart to carry him or her into the

126 Ibid. 320

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cultivation of softness of head. It is just as necessary to be wise as it is to have good intentions.127

In closing, Roosevelt acknowledged that charitable individuals and organizations, in an effort to compensate for the harsh realities of the problems they sought to ameliorate, could become vulnerable to sentimentality, and that risk had to be avoided. As expected, the president’s remarks were greeted with unanimous applause. I wonder, however, whether any of the conference attendees saw themselves in that mirror of good intentions, thinking it reflected instead their own personal wisdom.

The final address of the evening was the keynote, delivered by Julian W. Mack, former

Judge of the Juvenile Court of Chicago and member of the conference’s organizing board:

The keynote, preventive work. To my mind, that is the significant thing of this conference, not what we shall do for the dependent child of to-day, not whether he shall go into an institution, be it a congregate or a cottage, or into a family home, but how shall we stop dependency? [Applause] … of course, until we eradicate poverty, until social justice shall prevail, we shall have dependents among us … the second … is the recognition that the home is the best place for the child, that every child deserves that which you give to your child, that which you will always want for your child – individualized care and love. I care not how wise, how kind, how noble the superintendent or matron of an orphan asylum of 500 boys and girls, the father or mother of a cottage of 25 children may be, they can not satisfy the child heart’s cravings for individual love … Those, ladies and gentlemen, are to my mind the notes struck together in the harmonious chord in this conference, wherein Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, priests and laymen, superintendents of orphan asylums and directors of home finding societies have met together, and, remarkable as it may seem to some – yet, when we consider the progress of the last few years, is not so remarkable …”128

Judge Mack’s keynote address was simple, and to the point. Prevention was called for at the conclusion of the conference. Preventing children from falling into dependency in the first place was the most important goal going forward. This could only be achieved, he argued, by dealing

127 Ibid., 214. 128 “Remarks of Hon. Julian W. Mack, Former Judge of the Juvenile Court of Chicago,” Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 221-23. 321

24:11 with poverty and by promoting social justice. He also advocated for adoption as the only appropriate alternative to institutionalizing children as long as dependency was an issue. He made a separate point that aligned with that of Roosevelt: consonance among the conference participants was integral to the meeting’s success. Mack elaborated on his observation to add that the harmony of the meeting was even more extraordinary because it materialized among representatives of different faiths: Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The officials had transcended interfaith discord to find agreement on Progressive agenda items that benefited children in need.

And so, the first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children was gaveled to a close. The culmination of years of discussion and months of planning resulted in an exchange that produced results that positively impacted the children it sought to aid. Even if the attendees were not quite ready to embrace the cooperation and harmony necessary to make the process a painless one, they did walk away with something tangible to show for the effort.

In one of his final official acts as president, Roosevelt sent a “Special Message” to the

House and Senate three weeks after the conclusion of the conference where he stated, in part:

The Census Bureau reported in 1904 that there were in orphanages and children’s homes about 93,000 dependent children. There are probably 50,000 more (the precise number never having been ascertained) in private homes, either on board or in adopted homes provided by the generosity of foster parents. In addition to these there were 25,000 children in institutions for juvenile delinquents … the interests of the nation are involved in the welfare of this army of children, no less than in our great material affairs.129

In this message, Roosevelt set the table by arguing that there was real depth to the crisis while more than 160,000 children in America were in danger of being failed by a catch-as-catch-can system that operated without a centralized ability to track dependent children and their

129 Roosevelt, “Special Message.” 322

24:11 outcomes.130 He then placed in front of legislators the action items agreed upon by participants during the conference, all supporting the idea that “home life is the highest and finest product of civilization. Children should not be deprived of it except for urgent and compelling reasons.” 131

Most importantly he offered that poverty, in isolation, was not reason enough to separate children from their families and so primary on the list of ideas was recognition of the fact that poverty would have to be mitigated in order for families to stay together.

The conference was followed by part two of The Delineator’s campaign push. First was the campaign to connect children who were available for adoption, indenture, or fostering with new families. This campaign commenced simultaneously with Daggett’s first contribution. The youngest of which were newborns and the oldest, ten or eleven years of age, both boys and girls, from across the country. The details of their stories varied, but all were predictably heartbreaking in expressing the loss these children had suffered by virtue of being orphaned or abandoned. The home-finding part of the campaign experienced unexpected success, placing all but one child featured in the magazine in a permanent home, more than one hundred in all.132 In addition, over the length of the campaign, hundreds more found homes because of the cooperation of the superintendents of child home agencies who credited The Delineator with raising awareness of the need for loving homes. In the second major push of the campaign, this success emboldened the magazine and its editor to call for the eradication of congregate institutions of every kind-- private, public, religious, and secular:

130 This number represents children in institutions, orphanages, foster homes, and juvenile detention facilities. 131 Ibid. 132 Baby girl Miko became ill during the campaign for her placement and passed away from an undisclosed illness. 323

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deficiency of its childhood life. The hour has now come when the evil which the old fashioned institution in almost all cases unconsciously does must be forcefully and vigorously emphasized.133

The character of Dreiser’s instruction is insistent, as if to say, “we have shown you the dark underside of the lives of dependent children held captive in orphanages—you must confront the darkness with the cleansing light of shared knowledge.” As editor, Dreiser orchestrated the tone and timbre of the magazine’s coverage and child-rescue campaign. Orphanages thus became the object of intense editorial scorn and every bit of the negative coverage the magazine could muster. As a result, part two of The Delineator’s child-saving campaign moved from creating an emotional connection to the dependent children to depicting them as the victims of those who knew no better way:

They have been rescued from so much worse, that is really why society has always felt it had a right to be complacently self-satisfied over the charities that it supports for them. Found on a doorstep blanketed in the snow of a Winter’s night, picked up drifting about in the alleys, living from hand to mouth, committed by a kindly court that snatches them from crimes to come. So they have arrived by devious courses, but always trailing clouds of tragedy with them. And, however the details vary on their previous condition of suffering, it is usually true that they were hungry and cold and ragged and dirty.134

This excerpt recalls the opening images of Chapter 3, a trio of news clippings with the briefest of mentions of abandoned waifs in the cities of this study. But who knew the outcomes that this band of orphans faced? The Delineator claimed it did. If you knew nothing about the

Progressives’ view of the state of American orphanages in the opening decade of the twentieth century, this excerpt that framed Potter Daggett’s second major article shook you from your

133 “The Delineator Child-Rescue Campaign: For the Child That Needs a Home and the Home That Needs a Child: News of The Delineator Family,” The Delineator, 73:1 (Jan. 1909), 101, HathiTrust.org. 134 Daggett, “Where 100,000 Children Wait: In Old-Fashioned Orphan Asylums They are Victims of Oppressive Routine and Discipline and Denied the Joys of a Real Home,” The Delineator, 72:5 (Nov. 1908), 773, HathiTrust.org, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=md39015080400768&view=1up&seq=120. 2) 324

24:11 sleepy self-content. Readers were challenged to recognize that the author had crafted an exposé with which to be reckoned. In a single paragraph, she acknowledged the depths of depravity and dispossession from which American charitable efforts had lifted orphans and impoverished children, and then summarily reproved those efforts for their lack of a broader vision. Good was obviously not good enough. The follow-up to Daggett’s 1907 exposé appeared in the November

1908 edition of The Delineator.

Fig. 49 – “The Delineator, Cover, Nov. 1908.”135

Once again, Daggett proved her ability to craft a phrase that was both dense in imagery and packed the desired emotional punch. Her assignment had been to undertake an investigation of the living conditions of the child inmates of America’s institutional orphanages and produce an essay that would move a complacent public to action. Her findings were meant to draw attention

135 “Cover Image,” The Delineator, 73:1 (Jan. 1909), HathiTrust.org, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=md39015080400768&view=1up&seq=1. 325

24:11 to what was interpreted by some as American antipathy toward the real plight of orphaned children. The article, “Where 100,000 Children Wait,” became the standard carried into battle by the child welfare movement warriors who pushed for grand reforms of the orphan system, especially the elimination of large asylums.

“In 1241 institutions throughout the United States 100,000 such children are gathered today. There they are steam-heated and shower-bathed and check-aproned and dining-room rationed … But, listen! Still, they are hungry and cold – with a hunger that is heart deep and a chill that strikes to the soul.”136 Daggett had a well-developed ability to kickstart readers’ emotional and intellectual responses: “This is the new revelation that has come through the most advanced sociology. Nineteenth-century philanthropy was called sternly to the bar by the twentieth century … for when it has fed and clothed and warmed him, it has not loved him.”137

She not only lauded the Progressive Era’s scientific approach to evaluation of childcare methodology and its application to charity, she also condemned the existing system for providing for the physical and material requirements of the orphan while ignoring his emotional needs, all in just two sentences.

Nevertheless, the broad brush with which she painted every institution was, at best, well- meaning but wrong-headed and, at worst, openly cynical. It existed in conflict with the lived experience of many children and yet she lumped them all into a class of orphans who received soulless, loveless care. Certainly, her characterizations reflected the actual experience of some children in institutional care. To think otherwise, would be to accuse Daggett of fabricating several aspects of her essay. Yet, the fact that children did thrive in a number of large institutions, principally outside the nexus of the troubling stories about institutional care in the

136 Ibid., 773. 137 Ibid. 326

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Washington, D.C./New York/Philadelphia triangle, must not be ignored. Her extrapolation of a few visits to cherry-picked congregate orphanages to those of the nation as a whole, betrays an inherent writer’s bias against her subject. Her conclusions were likely reached even before the investigation began.

With The Delineator’s goal of destroying orphanages in mind, Daggett directed her efforts primarily at the large institutions that housed hundreds of orphans under one roof: “The county orphan asylum, or the sheltering refuge, or the home for little wanderers is proudly pointed out as an object of local interest along with the soldier’s monument and the new town hall. Visitors admire, as well they may, the beautiful building with its faultless architecture.”138

Daggett’s powers of description were fulsome. With great flourish, she created an image of a large institutional childcare facility and surrounding grounds that seemed to exist solely for the benefit of the self-possessed donors. Monied individuals, whose financial contributions to the institution were allegedly reflected in their preoccupation with the grandeur of the facilities, were prioritized over the needs of the children who were sequestered away in rooms unseen:

All the while the house has seemed still as if children did not live here … you will be surprised at the ease with which the machinery works and will exclaim in the compliment that always comes from the onlooker, ‘How well you have them trained!’ … Then you walk off down the hill lost in admiration of how the wheels go round … This you will do unless you have the new sociological vision that refuses to be dazzled by a polished, beautiful building.139

Daggett’s story casts a shadow across the souls of those who operated under the mistaken impression that little orphans who were clean, and clothed, and fed, were also happy. Her narrative darkened their conscience. Among those who already agreed with her, and with The

Delineator’s position on the state of institutional childcare, her essay elicited the knowing smile,

138 Ibid. 139 Ibid., 774. 327

24:11 and the smug recognition of their own brilliance in having identified the problem long before the common man and woman were awakened to the crisis.

She inferred that every orphan had been silenced, stifled among the highly-polished marble floors and fine stonework exteriors of these temples of charity. Her conceit was that she was in the small circle of those familiar with the “most advanced sociology,” including

Pavlovian theory on classical conditioning:

Resting a hand gently on his head, and lifting his chin, so, you will look into that child’s eyes, where you can read the answer to the institution’s efficiency. What you have found there is a look than can only be loved away … If life were lived in an army, the institutional training of a child might afford him some preparation. It teaches him to obey, and obey – and obey some more … He can do nothing at all until he gets the command.140

Daggett claimed that the children who came through the large institutions were forever numbed to the joys of life by the experience. She alleged that they were made incapable of taking care of themselves once released to the outside world because they had been trained to fulfill the discrete role of a fungible work unit that served the institution itself, instead of being trained to take care of themselves when they reached adulthood. “They say a great many of the deserted wives who are becoming such a problem in the cities were girls brought up in the institutions where they never learned the mysteries of housekeeping.”141 Again, this claim does not withstand the scrutiny of historical examination. Based on the records of any number of the institutions discussed in this study, boys and girls received vocational training, including shoemaking, printing, agriculture, drafting, blacksmithing, and, yes, housekeeping duties. They were certainly not the one-trick ponies of Daggett’s imagination, child workers strung down the length of a widget production line.

140 Ibid. 141 Ibid., 775. 328

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Did she fully investigate and report the facts as she found them? Or did she merely seek to confirm her previous opinions and create a narrative to fit those expectations? The longer she spun the simile of orphaned children as soulless little automatons, the deeper she plunged into assigning the administrators of these institutions wholly disturbing motivations:

A bell rings at 9:30 and it is the school hour. The new way is to let the children out for public school. But after the humanizing contact with children from the real homes they come back with a sparkle and a spontaneity that is at variance with the institutional plan, which must aim for repression … It is the institutional ideal that deadens individuality and destroys initiative. The theory toward which it inevitably converges is that the only good child is a still one, operated by automatic rule … It is methods like these that are passing away. There is dawning the perception that it’s uniforming (sic) children’s souls to uniform their living.”142

Once again, reality pushed back against The Delineator’s narrative. Dr. Wolfenstein of the JOA, for example, made the decision to educate the children resident at the home by bringing teachers into the facility. The contemporaneous reality was that the JOA sat in the middle of Cleveland’s

“Roaring Third” police district (see Chapter 5). Children had to pass bars, brothels, and gambling dens on their way to and from school. This was not a location that promised “a sparkle and a spontaneity.” When the JOA moved to University Heights in the 1920s, becoming the cottage- style Bellefaire, the children were enrolled in public schools.

The data collected from the Special United States Census Report of December 31, 1904, cited by President Roosevelt in his invitation to the White House Conference on the Care of

Dependent Children, was used to produce a table in which the total number of orphans were ranked, by state, in order of greatest to fewest. It is no surprise that New York was first on the list with more than 28,000 orphans, but perhaps more so that Pennsylvania was second with nearly 12,000 orphans, and Ohio third with just over 8,000. In this second article, Daggett

142 Ibid., 775-76, 859. 329

24:11 included a version of this table summarizing the data to support her argument. Nevertheless, the examples of substandard orphan care, and her analysis of those examples, were little more than an extrapolation of a few in-person visits to institutions in New York State, Vermont, and

Pennsylvania. She used them to spin a yarn that impugned the reputation of every orphanage in the nation. Perhaps it was not just an unfortunate byproduct of the pressure to agitate public concern behind the child welfare campaign that permitted such a scattershot approach damning all “congregate” orphanages as soulless, production-line childcare. More than likely, it was an intentional part of The Delineator’s pro-child-rescue/anti-orphanage campaign.

Daggett did heap praise upon the New York Orphan Asylum at Hastings-on-the-Hudson north of Yonkers, run by Dr. Rudolph R. Reeder.143 The New York Orphan Asylum, later the

Graham School, was the successor organization to the city’s first private orphanage, the original

Orphan Asylum Society in the City of New York, founded in 1806 by Mrs. Isabella Graham and her friend Eliza (Mrs. Alexander) Hamilton. Daggett’s favorable coverage of Reeder seemed to have had as much to do with his folksy wisdom and direct contact with the boys under his charge as it did the cottage-style setting where an average of thirty children were housed in a single residential unit:

Under the general supervision of Dr. B. R. Reeder, one of the most talented child culturists in the country, some 240 children are housed there in eight pretty cottages. Family life has been approximated as closely as possible, with children of varying age in one group. Each cottage has its own garden, its own chickens, its own or dog or cat – and in some cases its own baby. Around each centers real human experience and human emotion … To relate the child to its environment, to translate daily experience in terms of education—that is Dr. Reeder’s purpose with his charges … A long-promised tennis-court is about to be possible. ‘Boys,’ says Dr. Reeder, ‘shall we get Italians from the village to do this grading? Now, I could pay four cents a cubic foot for the removal of this earth.’ Before the

143 Dr. Reeder attended the White House Conference of 1909 and spoke on the relative advantages of the cottage style over the congregate system. 330

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sentence is finished he has an eager bunch of laborers at his heels begging for the job.144

The fact that the Hastings-on-the-Hudson asylum was a cottage system likely saved it from the harsh treatment dealt other institutions. Certainly, Daggett found the awkwardly-phrased reverse psychology which spilled from the lips of the talented Dr. Reeder to induce orphans to engage in manual labor noteworthy, even admirable. Daggett did not observe this folksy appeal among the matrons who operated the orphan asylums closer to the city, or the religious orphanages across the nation that were operated by Catholic nuns, and Jewish and Protestant superintendents and caregivers, who were never given the chance to charm the journalist.

Fig. 50 – “The Delineator, Cover, Jan. 1909.”145

144 Ibid., 859-60. Daggett mistakenly identifies Dr. Reeder as B. R. Reeder. 145 “Cover Image,” The Delineator, 73:1 (Jan. 1909), HathiTrust.org. 331

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Gracing the cover of the January 1909 issue was a lovely woman, her hair bound up in a ribbon that matched the color of the purple hydrangea blossom whose intoxicating, imaginary fragrance she relished. She was serene, calm, and without an apparent care in the world. Her tranquility, however, belied the battle cry waiting in the pages just beyond the cover. Six weeks after “Where 100,000 Children Wait,” was published, the following editorial by Dreiser appeared. It was published contemporaneously with the conclusion of the White House conference and it continued to whet the appetite of America’s reformers and reformer wannabes for the emotion-laden propaganda that condemned all institutional orphan care:

The time has come in the Delineator Child-Rescue Campaign when a stand of considerable importance has to be taken … THE DELINEATOR has presented the facts in connection with the child, -- its homelessness, its loneliness, the deficiency of its childhood life. The hour has now come when the evil which the old fashioned institution in almost all cases unconsciously does must be forcefully and vigorously emphasized. We have always said that the child, when possible, should be in a home … We now say that, except in cases where medical or corrective supervision is absolutely necessary, the child should not be kept in an institution … 146

The Delineator picked the bogey man in this fight, the institutional orphanage. Virtually every orphanage was demonized in its coverage, regardless of local public sentiment about the institution or favorable depictions in local newspapers. “The scale and intensity of his readers’ response evidently took Dreiser by surprise, and he was soon mining the vein of public sentiment that he had struck.”147 In order to continue to grow the anti-orphanage movement portion of its campaign, the National Child-Rescue League pleaded for additional members:

THE DELINEATOR wants the institution done away with as soon as possible. The great mother-heart of America wants it done away with, and we say now that as rapidly as the women and the men of this country come to understand what the institution means to the child and its future, they will join hands to see that it is done away with. THE DELINEATOR, and behind it the BUTTERICK PUBLISHING COMPANY, is (sic) in this educational campaign to stay. The

146 Crenson, 10. 147 Ibid. 332

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National Child-Rescue League is now an accomplished fact. The actual members now number several hundred and every mail brings a material increase. The first step is to get new members. A membership of several hundred is gratifying, but far from sufficient to accomplish the purpose of the League—to place every normal child now in an institution in a family home. This is a matter requiring a national sentiment; the fused desire of millions of people is necessary to accomplish such an object.148

There it was, a plea for additional members to create a critical mass of individuals committed to letter writing and considering requests to adopt or foster children in need of a home that meant success for The Delineator’s campaign. Despite this entreaty, variations of which were repeated monthly throughout the campaign, the membership never reached the millions of which Dreiser dreamed, but several thousand additional Americans did join the cause:

You who have expressed your willingness to help … your first task … Get into the National Child-Rescue League your next door neighbor, your friend, your pastor, your grocer, every intelligent human being with whom you come into contact. We need them; the League needs them; the one hundred thousand children who are waiting for us to release them from soul starvation need them. Use the sympathy aroused in you to this end.149

If your sympathy was not aroused after reading about the soul-starvation of these 100,000 orphans, then you madam (or sir) had no heart. For those who were moved: “On another page of this issue you will find a copy of the constitution of the National Child-Rescue League; also a reproduction of the certificate of membership. Use these as your propaganda … we shall be ready for the next step in behalf of the homeless child.”150

148 “The Child-Rescue League: The Delineator Starts a New and Aggressive Campaign for Doing Away with the Old-Fashioned Orphan Asylum,” The Delineator, 73:1 (Jan. 1909), 102, HathiTrust.org. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid. 333

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Fig. 51 – “‘National Child-Rescue League,’ The Delineator, Jan. 1909.”151

There is no mistaking the calculated impact of the image in the center of the page. A small girl, perhaps three years old, stands at the end of a bed in prayer. No parent stands beside her—the obvious implication—she is all alone. The entreaties within the text are equally direct: “love,”

“help,” “believe.” It is a plea meant to capture the reader’s attention immediately. There is ample white space on the page which leads the eye directly to the most important information. If you did not read the article which mentions the National Child-Rescue League, you would certainly be captured by the entirety of this message in a single viewing.

In this same issue, The Delineator also published a number of letters to the editor, likely solicited by Dreiser, from well-known members of the child reform movement:

From Seymour H. Stone of the Boston Children’s Friend Society: It is good to see THE DELINEATOR calling attention to the evil influences of institution life upon a normal child. How can we expect a child reared as part of a great machine to meet as he should his individual responsibility in life and to compete with the average child brought up under normal conditions? From my experience in the

151 “National Child Rescue League – Will You Help?,” The Delineator, 73:1 (Jan. 1909), 4, HathiTrust.org. 334

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placing of children … we never have to turn a child away for lack of room; epidemics are unknown, and we can place brothers and sisters of all ages together. Moreover, we are caring for fifty percent more children than we ever did before under the institution plan. Hammer away at it until you get results! The poor stifled children in barrack institutions need all the tireless champions that they can find.152

The Boston Children’s Friend Society was founded as a traditional orphanage, built to allow orphaned siblings to remain together rather than being sent to one of the two gender-segregated institutions in the city. Stone’s predecessor, Sherman Kingsley, abandoned the orphan home concept in the late 1880s and began placing children in foster care, so his distaste for congregate institutions was understandable.153 It was logical that he had taken the position that institutions were no place to raise children. He also pointed out that children brought up in families had advantages over the institutionalized child, especially the opportunities for the children in families to master skills and individual responsibilities that those raised in a “great machine” would never have. This observation paired nicely with Daggett’s inference that children of institutions were minor cogs in a production line, learning an isolated skill that had no application in the real world—dooming them to failure as adults.

From C. Loring Brace of the Children’s Aid Society: I have read with great interest the brilliant article, “Where 100,000 Children Wait,” by Mabel Potter Daggett in the November DELINEATOR. It is a strong and illuminating story of well-meaning wrongs to children. In my own experience I have frequently known tender-hearted women to retain little children in the orphanages which they controlled rather than allow the Children’s Aid Society to place them in family homes, because, as they stated, while the children were in their care, they could see them and know that they were physically well. They would not take the responsibility of sending them anywhere out of sight, no matter whether good

152 The writer, Seymour H. Stone, was General Secretary of the Boston Children’s Friend Society. Seymour H. Stone Letter to the Editor of The Delineator printed in The Delineator, 73:1 (Jan. 1909), 120- 21, HathiTrust.org. 153 ‘Guide to the Boston Children’s Friend Society Records, 1837-1954,” Simmons University, http://www.beatleywest.simmons.edu. 335

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people were willing to adopt them or not. This well-meaning narrow-mindedness is at the bottom of the trouble.154

Loring Brace’s father Charles L. Brace was a twenty-six-year-old Congregationalist minister

when he and other clergymen founded the New York Children’s Aid Society in 1853. Their

model had historically been foster family placement and it was the very first to “orchestrate the

mass migration” of orphaned children to the Great Plains.155 Yet Children’s Aid had its own

checkered history of placing children in foster settings. Children’s Aid Society orphan train

placements were not always well-monitored and many children were subjected to abusive

situations.156 But Brace’s tone was one of dismissiveness of the misguided “tender-hearted

women” who would rather care for children in an orphanage than send them to what must have

seemed like the Wild West. Not everyone was as satisfied with out-of-sight/out-of-mind as

Loring Brace.

From Edwin Solenberger of Children’s Aid Society of Philadelphia: If these community resources for the care and training of children can not be trusted for the child from the orphan asylum, may we not well ask ourselves whether they can be trusted for any child? Is any one so pessimistic as to claim that all children ought to be gathered together and reared in institutions because the average American family can’t be trusted to bring up a child? … Mrs. Daggett recognizes the place and value of certain kinds of institutions even for dependent children, but the burden of her plea is that, speaking generally, the best way to help really homeless little boys and girls is to find a good family home for them.157

154 C. Loring Brace Letter to the Editor of The Delineator printed in The Delineator, 73:1 (Jan. 1909), 121, HathiTrust.org. 155 “Children’s Aid Society of New York,” Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, VCU Libraries: Social Welfare History Project, http://www.socialwelfare.library.edu. 156 For an excellent primer on the problems of the Orphan Train’s placements see Rebecca S. Trammell, Orphan Train Myths and Legal Reality,” The Modern American, 5:3, Fall 2009. 157 The writer, Edwin Solenberger, was General Secretary of the Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia). Edwin D. Solenberger Letter to the Editor of The Delineator The Delineator, 73:1 (Jan. 1909), 120, HathiTrust.org. 336

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The Philadelphia chapter, founded in 1882 by a group of mostly women volunteers, was a pioneer in the field of social work professionalization.158 Solenberger’s principal complaint was that people would rather see dependent children kept in an orphanage where their every movement could be monitored, rather than in foster homes where their care was overseen by professional case workers. He reasoned that if that were the case, no American family was capable of raising any child. No one could argue with the idea that in a perfect world children belong in homes with loving parents. But the tactics of The Delineator and its supporters among child welfare reformers were truly a case where the ends justified the means. Was it ever to be a matter of hyperbole over fact? W. B. Sherrard weighed in on the issue with gusto:

From W. B. Sherrard of the National Children’s Home Society: The Lord frequently does more for us than we ask for. For years I have been asking Him to raise up another Carrie Nation, whose little hatchet would smash the doors of every orphan asylum in the land … Now comes Mrs. Daggett, not with a little hatchet, but a sledge-hammer, which will not only break the doors, but cause the walls to crumble … I can not (sic) urge too strongly that Mrs. Daggett continue as leading counsel for the little prisoners of the nation.159

Each of these writers were, of course, in complete support of the conclusions reached in

Daggett’s exposé and The Delineator’s National Child-Rescue League efforts. They were among those with deep ties to child welfare who firmly established themselves on the side of foster care and placing-out programs. In accordance with contemporary editorial standards, were there no letters from those who may have had a legitimate bone to pick with Daggett’s findings that demonized them as a group, those who administered orphan asylums where children were cared

158 Sherri Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiation of the Family in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 12-13. 159 The writer, W. B. Sherrard, was Superintendent National Children’s Home Society, a federation of twenty-seven State Societies (Sioux Falls, SD). W. B. Sherrard Letter to the Editor of The Delineator The Delineator, 73:1 (Jan. 1909), 120, HathiTrust.org. 337

24:11 for, and about? A strong, well-defended argument is able to withstand scrutiny of its evidence and challenges to its conclusions. The Delineator permitted no such challenges.

Ultimately, with an enthusiastic Progressive in the White House, foundational changes at the federal level could be tackled head on. But the process of creating and funding a new federal agency from scratch proved to be a more complicated undertaking. In the end, it took eight attempts in the United States House of Representatives, and three in the United States Senate, the

White House Conference of 1909, and the intervention of two presidents to secure the required approvals to establish and fund the children’s bureau envisioned by Florence Kelley and Lillian

Wald more than a decade before. The Children’s Bureau finally became a reality in 1912. Its inaugural director was Julia Lathrop, the first woman to lead a federal agency. An associate of

Jane Addams at Hull House, Lathrop was appointed to the Illinois State Board of Charities in

1892 where she served before being tapped to lead the Children’s Bureau. Two items were at the top of the nascent agency’s list of concerns: investigating and reporting on mother’s aid

(mother’s pensions – the forerunner of aid to dependent children programs) and foster care:

The strong declaration in favor of the care of children in their own homes led to a movement for mother’s pensions which swept the country during the next decade. The recommendation of family care instead of institutional care, when practicable, for children necessarily removed from their own homes contributed greatly to the development of adoption agencies and still more to the boarding-out care for children unavailable for adoption. The ‘cottage plan’ in place of the congregate institution was another development that followed in the wake of the Conference suggestion.160

Before he left office, Roosevelt sent letters to state governors endorsing the recommendations made at the 1909 conference for actions at the state level. Changes and implementation of new programs came slowly, not through presidential endorsement but, over time, as states observed the successes and difficulties of experimentation in other states.

160 “The Story of the White House Conferences on Children and Youth,” 5. 338

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Lathrop’s principal interest was preventing maternal and infant mortality, and she focused that interest through the filter of social justice: “The Children’s Bureau is an expression of the nation’s sense of justice, and the justice of today is born of yesterday’s pity.”161 Her signature accomplishment from her decade at the helm of Children’s Bureau was the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act into law. It expanded the work of the Children’s Bureau to the state level, enabling federal support for social welfare programming to the states. Sheppard-Towner became a victim of the economic downturns of the Great Depression, however, and it was allowed to expire in 1929, but some of its provisions survived to be included in the Social

Security Act of 1935.162

The Children’s Bureau proclaimed 1918 “Children’s Year,” a reminder in the midst of

American involvement in the first world war, that children were the nation’s future. The

“Children’s Year” campaign had the support of President Wilson. It was a “campaign designed to arouse the nation to the importance of conserving childhood in terms of national peril” and the second White House Conference on Children, held in 1919, was the result of this Children’s

Year campaign.163 Wilson’s efforts were based in his position that the protection of America’s children, one-third of the nation’s population, was second only to the care of the American soldier at the front. His goal was that the campaign develop “minimum standards for the health, education, and work of the American child.”164 At the heart of these efforts was the preservation of familial love and cohesion, critical for the “connection between love and democracy, the

161 Julia Lathrop, “Proceedings of the National Conference on Charities and Correction (1912), 32 quoted in Paul Theerman, “Julia Lathrop and the Children’s Bureau,” American Journal of Public Health, 39, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. 162 Ibid. 163 “The Story of the White House Conferences on Children and Youth,” 6. 164 Ibid. 339

24:11 intimate joining of private and public life.”165 It was also a campaign that foreshadowed what scholar Carol Gilligan calls the modern ideas about “family [taking] many forms.”166

Lathrop called for the White House Conference on Child Welfare Standards to be held in

May 1919. The participant list was refined to reflect a change in the focus of this second conference from the first. Experts from outside the United States were invited to provide ideas about “new protective measures for children growing up under war conditions.”167 In addition, the impact of Progressive Era professionalization played a significant role in determining the guest list with: “social workers, pediatricians, obstetricians, psychiatrists, public health nurses, educators, economists, judges, and club women.”168 The two significant themes of this second conference were: the “necessity for more public effort in behalf of children, and the expenditure of that effort in the light of the individual characteristics of each child and his family.”169 Unlike the 1909 Conference in which Roosevelt sent a list of recommendations to Congress for the legislature to enact, the 1919 conference was the launch pad for regional conferences in major cities: New York, Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Seattle and then by local conferences in smaller cities and less-populated states. It would take time for recommendations from the 1919 conference to wind their way through legislation at the federal, state, and local levels.

***

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American child welfare was in a near constant state of flux. There were orphanages, asylums, and homes each providing shelter and

165 Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love (2002) (Vintage, 2003), 229. 166 Ibid., 230. 167 “The Story of the White House Conferences on Children and Youth,” 7. 168 Ibid. 169 Ibid. 340

24:11 more to anywhere from 15 to 1,500 children. The largest of these institutions were found in the heavily populated Atlantic coast port cities: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston, as well as the nation’s significant inland and Pacific coast cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The disparity between the size and administration of the childcare institutions in metropolitan areas and large cities were obvious. But as it was, and is, between the coasts, in the great expanse of the middle of the nation, there are a plurality of American experiences.

The German Waisenhaus movement had once been gold standard for dependent childcare. But as the nation approached the dawn of the American century, it chose to jettison many European ideas, including that of large institutional childcare facilities in favor of cottage- style institutions, foster care, and adoption. The idea of supplementing, or even creating families with children from institutional care who needed a home was appealing to many, including middle-class women who saw in the pages of magazines such as The Delineator, the faces of innocent children who cried out for a parent’s love. These women were experts in their role as family managers and consumers-in-chief. As free time expanded their opportunities to explore life beyond day-to-day domestic responsibilities, middle-class women had choices to pursue causes, personal interests, and family enrichment as never before. Cincinnati-born and trained artist Elizabeth Nourse captured the quiet love and serene strength of late nineteenth and early twentieth century motherhood. The women who were immortalized in her paintings were beautiful in their own right. They would not compete with the glamorous ladies of the covers of magazines, nor did they want to. They chose instead to roll up their sleeves and make a difference in the lives of their families and others.

Women’s magazines did more than just provide escape from the mundane activities of daily living, however. They were outlets for advice, information, and important human interest

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24:11 stories, especially those that tugged at heartstrings and hit close to home. Because they were popular periodicals in millions of middle-class American households, they had a unique opportunity to influence and mobilize a significant portion of the American population. These women would be the foot soldiers in any efforts to reform child welfare in the United States.

President Theodore Roosevelt was always ready for a challenge, especially one he considered worth the fight. He willingly took up the cause of child welfare reform, calling for the White

House Conference on Care of Dependent Children just before the end of his second term. The conference, which brought together more than two hundred child welfare advocates and professionals, men and women from across the religious and secular spectrum would agree in principle at the outset to support the creation of a federal children’s bureau. But the conference was not without its fractures and hurt feelings, although most were put aside for the sake of the appearance of unity.

The Progressive Era, known in part for the effort of crusading journalists, the so-called muckrakers, found a ripe issue ready to be harvested with the child welfare movement. It would prove to be a winning campaign for the children who found forever homes through the pages of

The Delineator and the National Child-Rescue League. It was also a success for the journalists and the editor of The Delineator who saw their efforts successfully shape opinions and embolden hearts. For those individuals who devoted their lives to the care of orphaned and abandoned children only to have their motives impugned by people who knew nothing about them or the positive impact they indeed had on many lives, it was an injustice. Ultimately, it was a losing battle for them, and one from which they were forced to walk away, closing the door to the orphanage behind them.

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The Children’s Bureau, which celebrated its founding in 1912, strove to collect and provide data on dependent children, their needs and outcomes. This agency had a major impact on the financial and physical challenges that left children vulnerable to becoming dependent in the first place, working toward securing pensions for mothers and income insurance. As these reforms began to ripple through federal and state legislatures, they would have an impact on how local and regional child-saving institutions transformed their operations, and ultimately, whether they operated at all.

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Conclusion

Fig. 52 – “‘Orphant Annie,’ Johnny Gruelle, Orphant Annie Story Book (1921).”1

Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay, An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away. An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep, An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board – an’ keep; An’ all us other children, when the supper-things is done, We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun, A list’nin to the witch-tales ‘at Annie tells about, An’ the Gobble-uns ‘at gits you Ef you Don’t Watch Out!2

Poet James Whitcomb Riley was a product of the Midwest, and an American icon. Through

performances of his poetry, he shared the Midwest’s regional quintessence with the nation.3

1 “Orphant Annie,” Johnny Gruelle, Orphant Annie Story Book (The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1921), 5. 2 James Whitcomb Riley, Little Orphant Annie, first published under Riley’s penname, “Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone,” The Old Swimmin’ Hole and ‘Leven More Poems (George C. Hitt & Co., 1883). 3 Riley was simultaneously known as the “Hoosier Poet” and the “Children’s Poet.” Elizabeth J. Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley: A Life (Indiana University Press, 1999), 3.

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Among his most celebrated works was Little Orphant Annie, first published in the Indianapolis

Journal in 1885 under the title, The Elf Child.4 Figure 52 above, “Orphant Annie” is an

illustration by Midwest-born author and artist John Barton “Johnny” Gruelle that appeared in his

1921 Orphant Annie Story Book.5 It is a collection of stories with Riley’s familiar orphan as the

main protagonist.6 Gruelle’s Annie is shown at the time of her introduction to the family with

whom she has come to live. She is clothed in “mittens made of old stockings,” a tattered dress

patched at the hem, a once-grand hat tied with a faded ribbon, and shoes that “had belonged to

her aunt … so large they could easily have held feet twice the size …”7 In this early depiction,

Annie’s gaze is directed off into the future—or the past—anywhere far away from the anxiety-

filled present, although we learn that the fictional orphan’s life improves markedly from that

4 James Whitcomb Riley, The Elf Child, Indianapolis Journal (Indianapolis, Indiana), Nov. 15, 1885, 10. The earliest mention of publication of The Elf Child (1883) is noted in Claudia Nelson, “Drying the Orphan’s Tear: Changing Representations of the Dependent Child in America, 1870-1930,” Children’s Literature (2001) 29, 52. In a subsequent publication, Riley changed the name of his heroine to Allie, in honor of orphan Mary Alice “Allie” Smith, a neighbor child who came to live with his family during the U.S. Civil War. A typesetter’s error changed her name to Annie, but Riley declined to force a correction, letting the error stand. Van Allen, 13. 5 Johnny Gruelle was also the creator and author of the Raggedy Ann and Andy characters popular into the mid-twentieth century. He based them upon Riley’s Little Orphant Annie and Raggedy Man poems. Little Orphant Annie was also the inspiration for Harold Gray’s serialized comic strip, Little Orphan Annie, which first appeared in 1924, gained new life as a Broadway musical and two motion pictures (1982 and 2017). The cultural impact of Riley’s little waif and her portrayal has been measurable. 6 Gruelle was not the only artist and author to memorialize Riley. Poet, literary historian, and Yale University professor Henry A. Beers was among a number of notable Americans of the day to speak at Riley’s funeral in Indianapolis in July of 1916, commemorating not only Riley’s life and work, but his enduring affection for, and connection to, his Midwest roots: “In a sense, Riley’s poems are provincial. They are intensely true to local conditions, local scenery and dialect, childish memories and the odd ways and characters of little county towns. … To all Americans who … at least … have had the good luck to … go barefoot; whether they dwell in the prairie states of the Middle West, or elsewhere, the scenes and characters of Riley’s poems are familiar. … His muse was a truant, and he was a runaway schoolboy who kept the heart of a boy into manhood and old age, which is one definition of genius.” Henry A. Beers, “The Singer of the Old Swimmin’ Hole,” in Beers, The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays (Yale University Press, 1920), 34, 37 quoted in John E. Miller, “The Funeral of Beloved Hoosier Poet, James Whitcomb Riley, Studies in Midwest History (July 2016) 2:6, 70. 7 Gruelle, Orphant Annie Story Book, 3.

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point forward, thanks to Gruelle.8 We benefit from Gruelle’s written description that

accompanies his illustration, a primer that works of fine art do not provide, yet there are

similarities between the work of Gruelle and Cincinnati-born impressionist Elizabeth Nourse.

Their choices of subject matter, specifically children, resonate with the sentiment of a time gone

by. A simple comparison of artistic achievement is not a fair one. Nourse’s work embodies an

elegance to which Gruelle’s illustrations never aspire but both help to enhance our understanding of American society’s changing sensibility regarding children, girls, motherhood, and domesticity.9

Like the influential corpus of work by Nourse and other artists, Riley’s poem and

Gruelle’s illustration and prose shone a light on the innocence of childhood and the high stakes

of child-rearing at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, the parentless Annie

might be considered the American corollary to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist of two generations

before. She was sweet and compliant, yet possessed by a spirit that elevated her innocence above

the experiences that likely left her wiser than her years. In the Victorian Era, childhood took on

the sanction of a romanticized ideal. Idyllic childhoods, filled with warm memories for parent

and child, became the mark of successful parenting when middle-class Americans were freed

from the worry of securing their daily existence.10 This paradigm was embodied in works of art,

prose, poetry, and music.

8 Gruelle dedicated this collection of short stories, published five years after Riley’s 1916 death, in tribute to the poet: “In memory of James Whitcomb Riley who knew the child-mind and delighted in its every fanciful imaging; who was himself a child at heart, a player of make-believe, a dweller in fairyland.” Orphant Annie Story Book, Dedication. 9 Nourse’s painting, Head of a Girl (ca. 1882), and Cincinnati native Frank Duveneck’s Whistling Boy (1890), both part of the permanent collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum, are also exemplars of the impact of Midwest artists on the American cultural landscape in the decades that spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 10 Marilyn R. Brown, “Baudelaire Between Rousseau and Freud,” in ed. Marilyn R. Brown, Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood Between Rousseau and Freud (Routledge, 2017), 1-27; and

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If Riley’s poem, Gruelle’s illustrations, and Nourse’s portraiture elevated the depiction of

children, childhood, and parenting, such works also reinforced the growing middle-class belief in

the positive nature of domesticity and the wholesomeness of American communal life.11 In a similar manner, the work of Indiana native Paul Dresser, a popular performer, successful songwriter, and eldest brother of author and Delineator editor Theodore Dreiser, resonated with the country’s collective mindset even as the United States transitioned from a primarily rural to an urban-centered society. Dresser’s On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Way uses images familiar to those who came from rural families across the nation, and specifically to residents of the

Midwest, in describing its setting: “In the distance loom the woodlands clear and cool … Where

I first received my lessons, nature’s school.” It was romantic and sentimental, and representative of Dresser’s ability to play to American’s society’s love affair with the rural heartland and fascination with the promise of America (home, hearth, and motherhood) as it approached the turning of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.12

Clement, Growing Pains. 11 David Anderson, “Telling Stories, Making Selves: Nostalgia, the Lost Cause, and Postbellum Plantation Memoirs and Reminiscences,” Civil War and Narrative (2017) 21-38; and Veronica Alfano, “William Morris and the Uses of Nostalgia: Memory in the Early and Late Poetry,” Victorian Studies (2018) 60:2, 243-254. 12 Paul Dresser, On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away (Harley, Haviland & Co., 1897). Round my Indiana homestead wave the cornfields, In the distance loom the woodlands clear and cool. Oftentimes my thoughts revert to scenes of childhood, Where I first received my lessons, nature's school. But one thing there is missing in the picture, Without her face it seems so incomplete. I long to see my mother in the doorway, As she stood there years ago, her boy to greet!// Many years have passed since I strolled by the river, Arm in arm with sweetheart Mary by my side. It was there I tried to tell her that I loved her, It was there I begged of her to be my bride. Long years have passed since I strolled thro' the churchyard, She's sleeping there my angel Mary, dear. I loved her but she thought I didn't mean it,

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In its day, On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away was regarded as an exemplary

expression of the American sensibility, even sentimentality. Speaking in wistful phrases,

Dresser’s troubadour pines for the two most important women in his life: the unconditional love

of his mother, and that of his first romantic love, both lost to time. It became a popular success,

one that enriched Dresser personally, and it was adopted at Indiana’s state song in 1913. But

Dresser’s artistic success was coupled with his drive to take full advantage of the fast-paced

changes in the American business landscape, including the burgeoning sheet music industry, and

technology that allowed his work to reach a wider listening, and buying, audience. In this way,

he was a product of his time, no less than any other enterprising figure, although On the Banks of

the Wabash, Far Away, can also be considered either an antidote to, or an escape from, the gritty

reality of America’s urban landscape, including the hardships of the working poor and immigrant

classes.

***

As the artistic works reviewed here demonstrate, the poetry, illustrations, paintings, and

music produced at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveal shared priorities and

common sentiments. Concepts of idealized motherhood, mother-child relationships, even childhood itself, as well as the deviations from those paradigms, were at the top of the list of shared social values at the turning of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They captured society’s fears and aspirations about the plight of children and the immigrant poor in ways that made them comprehensible to Americans. On the national stage, the dependent child-welfare

Still I'd give my future were she only here.// Oh, the moonlight's fair tonight along the Wabash From the fields there comes the breath of new mown hay Through the sycamore the candle lights are gleaming On the banks of the Wabash, far away.

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system in America was populated with large, often impersonal institutions, especially in the

major population centers along the nation’s Atlantic coast.13 That strategy was not, however,

routinely replicated across the nation, even on a smaller scale. It was supplemented, and at times

surpassed, by the efforts of individuals and communities in the Midwest, especially those with

significant ties to institutions of faith.

Within the dominant Protestant population, these charitable impulses arose from the crisis

of children suddenly orphaned as the result of cholera outbreaks in the cities of the study during

the 1830s and 1840s.14 These first Protestant facilities were exclusive to children of Protestant

families. Jewish and Catholic orphans were not welcome as a rule, regardless of the desperation

of their circumstances.15 As the American minority religious faith communities of Catholicism

and Judaism grew in size, it became critical for community leaders and concerned coreligionists

to find a solution for orphans and abandoned children within those communities.16

Those efforts culminated in the establishment of a wide array of institutions, facilities

confined within the geographic boundaries of a few parishes of a Catholic diocese and others that

ranged over a significant geographic region, hundreds of square miles in area, pulling children of

a common faith tradition together in one location, as in the case of the International Order of

B’nai B’rith orphanages in Cleveland and Erie. Catholic orphanages far outnumbered those of

13 See Askeland, Children and Youth in Adoption, 1-4; Dulberger, Mother Donit Fore the Best, 3-13; and Hacsi, A Second Home, 1-10. 14 See McTighe, “Leading Men, True Women,” 13; Morton, “Homes for Poverty’s Children,” 5; Ramey, “‘I Dream of Them Almost Every Night’” 36-38; and Smith, “The Specter of Cholera,” 21-22. 15 See Mss 1043, General Protestant Orphan Home Records, 1849-1970, CMC; Pressley Ridge Records; Mss 4049, Jones Home of Children’s Service Records and Mss 4544, Beech Brook, Inc. Records, WRHS. 16 See Brown and McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us, 1-12; Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion; Friedman, These Are Our Children, 1-12; Lattimore, Pittsburgh as a Foster Mother, 408, 427; Moloney, American Catholic Lay Groups, 1-11; Polster, Inside Looking Out, xi-xiv; Ramey, Child Care in Black and White, 1-9; Rohs and Erskine, Raised by the Church, 1-8; Metz, “The Sisters of Charity,” 209; and White, “Cincinnati’s German Catholic Life,” 113.

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either the Protestant or Jewish communities in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, a reflection

of the pressing need among Catholics. As a result of these communal strategies, there were four

times as many Catholic as Jewish orphanages, not surprising with the disparity in size of these religious communities as a whole. It is surprising, perhaps, that Catholic orphanages also outnumbered those of the dominant Protestant community, by a factor of two to one.17 Catholic child-saving efforts usually were undertaken by the clergy or women religious through diocesan efforts at the parish level. Jewish child-saving efforts mostly started with rabbis but quickly became trans-denominational communal efforts.18 The solutions that were implemented before

the onset of Progressive-era reforms were reflections of independent community ideas—they fit

the population and the needs of its children, not an imposed standardization of one size fits all.

This was a critical point in the history of America’s treatment of its dependent children

where the efforts of caregivers, administrators, and reformers intersected.19 It involved the often

competing, and sometimes complementary, efforts of individuals and communities in the

Midwest cities of Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh to take direct action, intervening in the

lives of the children who had already lost so much. The established efforts of these individuals

and communities were challenged, and motivated, by the large-scale social transformations that

converged during the period of 1880 to 1930. These changes included political and religious

17 As discussed in this study, there were, of orphanages with a stated religious affiliation, in the aggregate, 14 Protestant orphanages, 28 Catholic orphanages, and 7 Jewish orphanages. 18 See MS-36: B’nai B’rith District No. 2 (1904-1976) Records; MS-67: Orthodox Jewish Orphan’s Home; and MS-68: Jewish Orphan Asylum (Shaker Heights, Ohio) Records, AJA; Archives of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Bishop Horstmann I and II Papers, Bishop Schrembs Papers, and FCCS/CCC Records, ADC; Hospitals and Health Care: St. Paul’s, Hospitals and Health Care: St. Joseph’s, Hospitals – Health Care Services: St. Anthony’s Orphanage, Hospitals – Health Care Services: Welfare Fund of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, ADP; Mss 1098: Records of the St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum, CMC; Sisters of Notre Dame Archives – Chardon, Ohio and Sisters of Notre Dame Archives – Covington, Kentucky; and Mss 3665: Bellefaire Records: Series I and Series III, WRHS. 19 See Edwards, New Spirits, 160, 194, 240; and McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 107-114.

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reforms, and those that displaced existing ideas of race, ethnicity, and gender roles—even ideas about childhood itself.20

The individuals who appear in this study were committed to their roles, but not consumed by them, and many of them had responsibilities that took them far from the daily care of orphans, yet they were still personally involved. The efforts on behalf of orphaned and abandoned children were complicated during the Progressive Era by the influx of eastern and southern

European immigrants in the years between 1890 and 1924.21 Thousands of children who were full- and half-orphans, or who had been abandoned by family, grew up in one of the more than

100 institutions that operated in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh between the mid- nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, half of them with a religious affiliation. In each of these cities, the individuals, and the charitable organizations of which they were members, founded societies of care. There were orphan homes, asylums, and institutions, homes for the friendless child, children’s homes, protectories, and foundling hospitals, each designed to care for a particular constituency of children. Typically, the names of the organizations indicated a religious (e.g., the German Protestant Orphan Home, the St. Joseph Protectory, the Jewish

Orphan Asylum) affiliation rather than that of a municipality or an individual, but not always.

Most importantly, however, this study highlights the contributions of individuals who took action to solve the problems associated with orphaned and abandoned children. The Herschedes of

Cincinnati, Mother Ellen Donovan of Cleveland, and Jacob Gusky of Pittsburgh were among this group of charitable individuals. Their efforts were met by others who founded institutions for

20 Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 162-174. 21 See Crenson, Building the Invisible Orphanage. 301-303; and Cohen, “Child Saving and Professionalism,” 272-275.

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orphan care such as Hirsch Manischewitz, Duffie Workum Freiberg, Carlos and Mary Jones, and

Jacob Gusky’s widow, Esther.

The Herschedes took in two dozen orphans into their home and business, providing a safe

transition between the structured orphanage and the real world that was structureless by

comparison. Mother Ellen Donovan struggled with little assistance and grudging recognition

from the official Catholic church hierarchy as she and her “sisters” provided a loving home

environment to children and sibling groups. Jacob Gusky brought joy to the children in

orphanages through the Pittsburgh area, regardless of their religious faith. His wife Esther built

an orphanage in his memory because her husband “always had a soft spot” for these children.

Hirsch Manischewitz established the Orthodox Jewish Orphan Home in Cincinnati while helping

to oversee his family’s successful international baking business. He was matched by settler

family daughter Duffie Workum Freiberg who founded the Jewish Foster Home to provide for

children too young to be sent to the Jewish Orphan Asylum in Cleveland and to offer daycare

services to working parents in the Jewish community. In their retirement, Carlos and Mary Jones

of Cleveland founded and funded a home for Protestant children.

The Waisenhaus movement, itself an innovation when first introduced in Europe in the

nineteenth century, that replaced what had been a catch-as-catch-can system of foster and

foundling care, fell victim to the Progressive reform agenda, and was replaced by … foster care

and adoption.22 Child welfare outreach among Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant communities in

these cities shared a Midwest mindset that tended to run counter to prevailing dependent

childcare practices found on the Atlantic coast, as well as the proposed methods to modernize

22 Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers, 206-209, 356-60, 384-89; Crenson, Building the Invisible Orphanage, 94-96, 113-15, 246-47; Hacsi, A Second Home, 4, 47-48; and Holt, The Orphan Trains, 109, 164-66.

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them that became operational as the Progressive Era unfolded. The framework within which the adults responsible for the care of these children became involved in the child-saving movement reflected this reality.

These outreach efforts were sufficient in the nineteenth century to provide avenues for short-term and long-term care for children who were without a home due to the death or desertion of a parent, or the temporary need for shelter when a parent lost a spouse who had been the sole source of income for the family.23 As the nation continued to grow in size, so did the population of dependent children. Reformers who were busily involved in change movements that sought to remedy other social ills, eventually turned their attention to these children who desperately needed a home. The cycle of fostering and institutional care had little chance of being circumvented until the practice of paying mother’s pensions was introduced.24

At the forefront of child welfare reform were women who occupied multiple roles as mothers, activists, and volunteers. Women such as Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Florence

Kelley championed these efforts and served as intermediaries for the groundswell of local and regional interests and activities. They navigated politically-charged waters to push for commitments to action from those with access to power and the ability to make change happen.25

23 Anderson and Bertaux, “Poor Men but Hard-Working Fathers,” 145-152; and Harnish, “Jane Addams’ Social Gospel Synthesis,” 93-100. 24 Even today, local foster agencies throughout the nation are crowded with children whose parents are unable to care for them. Rather than the effects of endemic disease being at the heart of the crisis, it is substance abuse, principally of synthetic opioids, which pushes vulnerable children into the foster system. See, for example: Julie Miller, “Overdose Deaths Strain Foster Care: There’s a Rise in the Number of Kids Removed from the Home,” Behavioral Healthcare Executive (Winter 2018) 38:1, 29; Kathryn Shea and Mimi Graham, “Early Childhood Courts: The Opportunity to Respond to Children and Families Affected by the Opioid Crisis,” Zero to Three (May 2018) 38:5, 39-47; and Troy Quast, Melissa Bright, and Chris Delcher, “The Relationship between Foster Care Entries and High-Dose Opioid Prescribing in California,” Addictive Behaviors (June 2019) 93, 52-58. 25 See, for example, “Jane Addams to Senator Southerland,” Letter dated Nov. 25, 1909 regarding the Children’s Bureau; “James West to Jane Addams,” Letter dated Jul. 5, 1910 requesting Addams write a 4,000 word essay to fit the title “The Widow and Her Children,” for The Delineator; and “Letter from Jacob Schiff to Lillian Wald,” n.d., regarding Schiff’s complaint that Dr. Edward Devine damaged the

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They were also met in those efforts by businessmen who sought to turn their expertise in finance

and organizational administration loose on finding solutions for the problems faced by dependent

children and the system charged with their care. This was not a rigidly regulated system of

information sharing with a top-down approach, but a horizontally-integrated process where local

and regional activists learned from national leaders, and vice versa.

The vast majority of these institutions had a religious founding, if not an ongoing

religious affiliation. As this study has argued, organized religion and individual commitments to

faith were critical factors in the rise of the child-saving movement in the Progressive Era.

Dominant American Protestantism was met in the nineteenth century by efforts within minority religious communities to claim their own legitimacy as heirs to precepts of American religious liberty.26 The impact of the efforts of Paulist founder Isaac Hecker, in conversation with the

Roman Catholic community about the Americanization of Catholicism, was enlightening.27 Its importance to the discussion here revolves around the fertile ground of reform that is critical to understanding why some American Catholics were willing to push back against papal instruction while others were cowed into withdrawing within the dogma of their faith.28 Perhaps the

issuance of the papal encyclical Testem Benevolentiae caused Catholic women religious to

withdraw from the arena, and they were unable to stand up for their mission when Progressives

came to destroy the orphanages. Admonished by the pope, and abandoned by the male clergy

Charities and the Commons Report, with his “illiberal anti-immigration policy.” Jane Addams Digital Edition. https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/. 26 See Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People, 50, 131, 175; Ariel, An Unusual Relationship, 16-18, 33- 35; Diner, How America Met the Jews, 67-68, 77-79; Diner, The Jews of the United States, 116-18, 142- 44; Hennessey, American Catholics, 108, 280-295; Goldman, “In Search of American Judaism,” 141-42; Goldman, “Public Faith and Private Virtue,” 197; Goldman, “The Path to Reform Judaism,” 37-47; and Sarna, “A Sort of Paradise for the Hebrews,” 1-3, 27 O’Brien, Isaac Thomas Hecker: American Catholic, 191-208. 28 See Cuneo, The Smoke of Satan, 8; Woods, The Church Confronts Modernity, 37; McGuinness, Called to Serve, 1-14; and Dolan, “Catholics and American Culture,” 69.

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and laity who retained an inside connection to power, they retreated to formulate a mission that

turned to aiding the poor, taking care of the sick, and operating schools.

An important facet of the changing face of religion in the nineteenth century was the

founding of the American Jewish Reform tradition. By the turn of the centuries, Cincinnati, the

hub of the Reform synagogue movement, was ripe with potential and stature, boasted a highly

developed Jewish communal infrastructure, and primed to support the child-saving movement.29

With its nexus in Cincinnati, it was revelatory of the importance of the efforts of Isaac Mayer

Wise and others to bring an ancient faith into a colloquy with a modern system of civil

governance that promised full participation for American Jews.30 Wise, and those with whom he

worked, including fellow Reform rabbi Max Lilienthal, challenged each other, often as

frequently as they cooperated. Over the course of Wise’s life, he guided the establishment of the

institutions that would ensure the viability of American Reform Judaism. Wise created a

communal force for positive interfaith relationships across the nation, from his home in

Cincinnati.31

The machine politics that were synonymous with the Gilded Age played an important

municipal development role in the cities of this study. Their experience with bossism did not rise

to the magnitude of the damage to municipal government made infamous by New York City’s

Tammany Hall. Cleveland was ultimately self-reforming, Pittsburgh embraced its beloved boss and elevated him to mythic hero status, while Cincinnati’s experience with its own boss was benign by comparison.32 Local child-saving efforts required an ability to navigate local political

29 See Sarna, American Judaism, 1-3; and Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 105-64. 30 See Philipson, “Strangers to a Strange Land”; Raider, “The Rise of Stephen S. Wise as a Jewish Leader,” 143-44; and Sarna and Goldman, “From Synagogue-Community to Citadel of Reform,” 161. 31 See Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 105-64. 32 See Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati; Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph, 21-22, 33-39, 45-53, 72-73, 88, and 285-95; Trounstine, Political Monopolies in American Cities, 108-109, 157, 160, and 180-81;

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peculiarities and certainly there was a sort of quid pro quo in effect, especially where political

and religious power structures overlapped, or at least came into contact with each other. The

machine politicians of the late nineteenth century had their own vested interests in ensuring that

orphaned and abandoned children did not become a distraction to their operation of the city. No

one wanted to experience the overrun of the city by “dangerous children” who threatened civil

order as in New York.33 The changes on the municipal stage in these cities nevertheless reflected

the communities’ openness to reforms in other areas. From a national political vantage point, this study also revealed, to a minor extent, the ways in which public policy developed. Through navigating the network of connections among acquaintances, friends of friends, and even those on opposite sides of an issue, consensus was achieved before a public face was put on the issue.34 Such was the case of the 1909 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent

Children where the outcomes were baked in at the beginning of the process, rather than at its end

as a result of some deliberative efforts by the stakeholders in attendance.35

The Social Gospel movement played a critical, but Janus-like role, in the Progressive Era.

Its founders espoused a positive message about creating a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth in the present rather than merely praying for an eternal reward in the hereafter, one where people looked out for one another and social justice brought equity and prosperity.36 But many also

championed its darker side: scientific racism, Social Darwinism, and race suicide were all

Wright, Bossism in Cincinnati; and Lessoff and Connelly, “From Political Insult to Political Theory,” 146. 33 Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York; and O’Connor, Orphan Trains, 83-93. 34 Proceedings of the White House Conference, 9-14. 35 Ibid. 36 See Delio, “The First Catholic Social Gospelers,” 6; Feldman, “The Social Gospel and the Jews,” 308; and Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, 1-3, 7-9, 11-13, 21-22, and 26-27; Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order, 179, 376, and 278.

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pernicious offshoots of the Social Gospel movement.37 Social Gospelers’ direct impact within

the child-welfare reform movement was small, but consequential. The influential within the

movement spoke from pulpits, political stumps, and the pages of popular treatises to harden the

rhetorical ground upon which pedestals to racial hierarchy and superiority of one creed over

another were erected.38 This rhetoric could not help but have an impact on the environment

within which the futures of these children, many of whom were first-generation immigrants, was

decided.39

Gender and gender-related cultural implications also played a role in these events.

Women were experts in their roles as wives, mothers, family managers, and consumers-in-

chief.40 As free time expanded their opportunities to explore life beyond day-to-day domestic

responsibilities, middle-class women had choices to pursue causes, personal interests, and family

enrichment as never before.41 The motivations of women’s magazine publishers, especially for

purposes of this study, The Delineator and its managing editor, Theodore Dreiser, were assessed

for their impact on child-saving.42 Women often found inspiration in the stories of these issue

magazines that did more than just provide escape from the mundane activities of day-to-day living.43 They were outlets for advice, information, and important human interest stories,

especially those that tugged at heartstrings and hit close to home. Because of their popularity,

37 Leonard, “American Economic Reform in the Progressive Era,” 109-113; Leonard, “Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism,” 71; and Leonard, “Religion and Evolution in the Progressive Era,” 456. 38 Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel; Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis; Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis. 39 Gratton and Moen, “Immigration, Culture, and Child Labor,” 356. 40 Cruea, “Changing Ideals of Womanhood,” 188; Ryan, Womanhood in America; and Hill Fletcher, Motherhood as Metaphor, 17-18, 28-29. 41 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 50-52, 295-302; and Degler, Women and the Family, 136-40. 42 Weltman, “Be No More Housewives,” 105. 43 Bland, “Shaping the Life of the New Woman,” 165-68; and Davies, “Women’s Agency, Adoption, and Class,” 141-44. Hainze, “Rescued Children and Unfit Mothers.”

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these periodicals, which appeared in millions of middle-class American homes, possessed the

ability to influence and mobilize a significant portion of the female American population.44 The

Delineator, with a circulation north of half a million readers, pushed social justice journalism beyond previous expectations.45 Sometimes, though, the magazine pushed so hard that the

system retaliated, as much for self-preservation as anything else. When the 1909 White House

Conference on the Care of Dependent Children came out in favor of the best interests of

immigrant mothers, The Delineator had to soften its rhetoric that immigrant mothers were part of

the problem with dependent children.46

In comparison to earlier studies of child welfare and reform that were focused on the

Atlantic coast or individual cities in the nation’s interior, this is a regional comparative study, the first in the field. In addition, little of the extant scholarship has been concerned with inquiry into the efforts of individuals on behalf of orphaned children on personal religious grounds which also makes this a unique perspective from which to tell the story of charity and child welfare.

When individuals intervened on behalf of children, they were often animated by very personal expressions of traditional faith. Their outreach to children reflected that individual commitment to impact lives through direct action rather than through participation in a larger social movement, although simply by virtue of their efforts, they were involved, regardless of their intention to refrain from participating in a “movement.” The idea that deep and lasting relationships existed among these families and their faiths, and those with responsibility for the

44Hainze, “Rescued Children and Unfit Mothers,” 57-62. 45 Pierce, “Science, Advocacy and ‘The Sacred’,” 68-70; and Zuckerman, A History of Magazines, 27-35, 46-49. 46 Bland, “Shaping the Life of the New Woman,” 165-68.

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day-to-day care and education of the children within the confines of orphanages, it is possible

they were replicated in other parts of the country and represent more than just a regional trend.47

The stories of children abandoned by parents out of necessity or neglect, and society’s

efforts to protect and foster these children until they grew into adulthood, are timeless. From

antiquity to the present day, such children were often left to find their own way—with

predictably tragic consequences.48 They were also cared for by grandparents, siblings, or

members of kinship groups. Or, they happened upon salvation through the kindness of strangers

in the guise of public officials or private individuals and organizations.49 Religious faith and

traditions, motivated by the concept of aliena miseracordia, played a pivotal role in the evolving

societal attitudes toward orphans and abandoned children.50 What illuminates the differences,

also highlights the similarities among various ethnic religious communities in the United States,

in their treatment of orphaned and abandoned children.

Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh are representative of the critical demographic and

environmental elements that are found in many mid- and large-sized metropolitan areas of the

United States during the period of study, especially outside of the Atlantic coast port cities where much of the previous scholarship has been focused. They were magnets for European immigration, particularly German-speaking immigrants, but more broadly, central and southern

Europeans whose numbers included Catholics, Jews, and Protestants. Each city dealt with crises related to rapid urbanization including pollution, overcrowding, chronic disease, and dissolution of the family unit because of death, poverty, or abandonment. What connected these cities transcended physical geography. It was instead a prevalent pioneer mindset that emboldened the

47 McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 64-74. 48 Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers, 42-43, 128-31, 147-49, 158-60, 322-25, 432-34.. 49 Ibid., 206-09, 384-89, 404-405. 50 Ibid., xiv.

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first generation of migrants and immigrants across divisions of faith and was passed down to their descendants in varying degrees. It was this perspective that fostered unique solutions to local problems in child welfare by incorporating cultural and religious traditions of care such as the Waisenhaus institutional setting into faith enclaves on the frontier. There was also a utilitarian dimension to the reality of a Midwest dynamic, an interesting connection between faith and pragmatism – key ingredients of Progressivism.

A comprehensive analysis of the child-saving movement in the Midwest lies beyond the scope of this dissertation. Yet future scholarly investigations may benefit from the regional approach pursued here, especially insofar as the case studies on Cincinnati, Cleveland, and

Pittsburgh offer models for comparison with other Midwest cities and/or regional centers of the

United States. Would the outcomes be different for three cities in the South or the Mountain

West or would there be similar circumstances at play within those regions? Would results vary due to racial, ethnic, or religious demographic differences within their populations, or as a result of the timing of the cities’ founding and expansion in relation to the Progressive Era? Future scholarship could continue to add to the historiography of child-welfare reform efforts that make the field previously limited to single-city studies, richer and more diverse.51 New York, Boston,

Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Charleston, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh have been the subject of single-city studies and while these studies have been highly illustrative of the ways in which stakeholders within an insular city approached the problems of orphaned and abandoned children, valuable insights are also gleaned from comparative studies that focus on regions or other geographic areas.

51 Ramey, Child Care in Black and White; Rohs and Erskine, Raised by the Church; and Murray, The Charleston Orphan House.

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To date, the bulk of extant scholarship concerning the child-saving movement at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has neglected the significance of such efforts outside of major metropolitan centers like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. By focusing on three urban centers in the Midwest, this dissertation provides a fine grained and more complex understanding of such efforts without which it is impossible to appreciate the turbulent decades that shaped American society in the Progressive Era and the decades that followed. With its own distinctive and determined persistence, the Midwest imprinted its values and beliefs on the nation’s ideational landscape. The Midwest models that laid the groundwork for continued outreach to dependent children and adolescents shine a light on the emergence of modern

American social history and help us to better understand the Progressive Era’s impact on

American society writ large.

As American society’s dynamic understanding of childhood unfolded at the dawn of the twentieth century, Progressive-era reformers in the Midwest had a striking influence on the national discussion about the country’s child-saving movement. The productive connections in this regard drew on an intricate web of relationships among social gospelers, America’s variegated religious communities, the women’s movement, and key communal figures and leaders. As the individuals and institutions within this story acted to impact the lives of dependent children with whom they were in close connection, they were transformed by

Progressive Era reforms and by the exigencies of a changing political and social environment.

Of all the institutions that operated in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh during the period of this study, none exist today in their original format. They have been replaced by taxpayer-funded, government-run foster home placement agencies and private, for profit and non-profit programs that offer aid to dependent children, the successor to the mother’s pensions

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of the Progressive Era. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, virtually all of institutional orphanages

in the cities of the study that could afford to transform to the cottage-style institution did so.

Those that did not, usually diocesan-run Catholic orphanages and the orphanages run by B’nai

B’rith districts, were closed between 1940 and 1960. The institutions that continue to have a

physical presence in their communities have been transformed into residential and outpatient

care settings for children and adolescents with developmental disabilities, behavioral disorders,

and substance abuse issues. They have also founded programs to provide family support services

for those families under financial and emotional distress. Regardless of their current missions,

however, these institutions are the beneficiaries of the Progressive Era’s child-saving campaign,

and the Midwest models that laid the groundwork for continued outreach to dependent children and adolescents.

***

An’ little orphant Annie says when the blaze is blue, An’ the lamp-wick sputters, an’ the wind goes woo-oo! An’ you hear the crickets quit, an’ the moon is gray, An’ the lightnin’-bugs in dew is all squenched away,-- You better mind yer parunts an’ yer teachers fond an’ dear, An’ churish them ‘at loves you an’ dry the orphant’s tear, An’ he’p the pore an’ needy ones ‘at clusters all about Er the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you Ef you Don’t Watch Out!52

52 Riley, Little Orphant Annie.

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Select Bibliography

Archival Collections American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio AJA MS-36, B’nai B’rith District No. 2 (1904-1976) Records MS-62, Bene Yeshurun Records MS-67, Orthodox Jewish Orphan’s Home MS-68, Jewish Orphan Asylum (Shaker Heights, Ohio) Records MS-366, United Jewish Social Agencies MS-852, Big Brothers/Big Sisters Association of Cincinnati (1903-2010) Records Isaac Mayer Wise Digital Collection Archives of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati AAC Archives of the Diocese of Cleveland ADC Bishop Horstmann I Papers Bishop Horstmann II Papers Bishop Schrembs Papers FCCS/CCC Records Archives of the Diocese of Pittsburgh ADP Hospitals and Health Care: St. Paul’s Hospitals and Health Care: St. Joseph’s Hospitals – Health Care Services: St. Anthony’s Orphanage Hospitals – Health Care Services: Welfare Fund of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County Cincinnati Museum Center, Historical Society Library and Archives CMC Mss 1043, General Protestant Orphan Home Records, 1849-1970 Mss 1098, Records of the St. Aloysius Orphan Asylum Harvard College Library, Boston, Massachusetts HCL TRColl. MS Am 1454.50 Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania HHC Jane Addams (Archive) Digital Edition, Bergen, New Jersey JADE Leo Baeck Institute Center for Jewish History LBI AR11429, Freiberg Family Collection, Digital Collection Rauh Jewish Archives (Heinz History Center) RJA The J. M. Gusky Hebrew Orphanage and Home of Western Pennsylvania, Unprocessed Collection Sisters of Notre Dame Archives – Chardon, Ohio SND-Chardon Sisters of Notre Dame Archives – Covington, Kentucky SNC-Covington Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, Dickinson, North Dakota TRC Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio WRHS Mss 3385, Citizens League of Greater Cleveland Records Mss 3665, Bellefaire Records: Series I Mss 3665, Bellefaire Records: Series III

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Mss 4049, Jones Home of Children’s Service Records Mss 4544, Beech Brook, Inc. Records Mss 4583, Jack Girick Papers

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