Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [622]
Most of these establishments imposed a rigorous and moralistic order on their “inmates.” They required the able-bodied to work: men labored in the quarry, rowed ferryboats to the mainland, and were on occasion loaned out to clean sewers; women cooked, washed, ironed, sewed; expectant mothers scrubbed floors. But these tasks, originally intended to inculcate values while offsetting costs, soon degenerated into devices for maintaining discipline or imposing a punitive routine. Rehabilitation had given way to warehousing.
“IDLE AND VICIOUS CHILDREN OF BOTH SEXES”
The reform community’s greatest efforts were devoted to rescuing children of the poor—now, more than ever, considered a threat to civic stability. In 1849 George Matsell, New York’s chief of police, alerted residents to a “deplorable and growing evil” that threatened the very survival of the city. “I allude,” he wrote, “to the constantly increasing number of vagrants, idle and vicious children of both sexes, who infest our public thoroughfares.” The three-hundred-pound Matsell was detested in workingclass neighborhoods—Mike Walsh called him “a degraded and pitiful lump of blubber and meanness”—but his warning inflamed the imaginations of middle- and upper-class reformers. The Rev. Edwin Chapin quite agreed that “the children of the Poor create an appeal to prudential considerations,” as they “form a large proportion of those groups known in every city as ‘The Dangerous classes.’”
By the late 1840s children under fifteen constituted almost one-third of the city’s population (comparable to London’s 31.9 percent though far more than Paris’s 19.6 percent). The virtual disappearance of apprenticeship with its provision of room, board, and steady work had freed many from traditional constraints, and working-class families, who expected children to earn their keep from early on, routinely sent their young into unsupervised street trades.
Even more alarming than the swarms of children working the streets were those who lived on them as well. Many were orphans—poor parents often died young—but others simply didn’t like working-class family life, with its enforced sharing and cooperation, its parental discipline, often its parental violence. The streets beckoned the discontented with their alluring range of things to buy and places to go; even boys with homes slept out for weeks at a time, swelling the ranks of vagrant children.
The AICP’s solution was similar to the one they fashioned for adult immigrants: round the children up, then slot them, depending on character, into reformatories, schools, or bourgeois-type homes. To accomplish the first goal, the AICP drafted a model Truancy Law and, with help from the Female Guardian Society, got the state legislature to pass it in 1853. The law empowered police to arrest vagrant children between the ages of five and fourteen. If they proved to be orphans, they were to be made wards of the state and institutionalized. If not, they were to be turned over to their parents, who were enjoined to send them to school—an injunction given teeth by making school attendance a condition of family relief. If parents still failed to live up to their responsibilities, authorities were authorized to seize the children “and place them under better influences, till the claim of the parent shall be re-established by continued sobriety, industry and general good conduct.”
The legislation was less effective than it might have been in banning children from the