Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [623]
The hard cases were packed off to the House of Refuge, founded in 1824 and still going strong, though newly relocated in 1854 to Randall’s Island. There, isolated from the wicked city and adult prisoners alike, youthful vagrants were set to laboring alongside convicted juvenile delinquents and rebellious sons and defiant daughters who had been committed by their working-class parents. In the House of Refuge, the AICP noted approvingly, twelve-year-olds were “trained in habits of industry” by being compelled to make sixty pairs of ladies’ shoes a day, which sold briskly in retail shops, undercutting adult shoemakers.
The AICP did worry, however, that inmates who were hardened reprobates would drag down into delinquency those who were as yet merely vagrant and neglected. So the organization proposed and helped institute the New York Juvenile Asylum (1851), dedicated to teaching disobedient and idle children “self-discipline of body, mind, and heart” and then apprenticing them to employers. The asylum, unfortunately, proved no more effective an agency of reform than did the House of Refuge, and it too came to serve primarily a custodial function.
The reformers vested their major hopes for saving the salvageable in the school system, which underwent a major reorganization in these years. The Public School Society, the private board that had been running the free schools with public money, was subordinated to, and then in 1853 subsumed by, the popularly elected Board of Education. The public system launched an ambitious building program, constructing some schools capable of holding a thousand or more, and hired women as teachers, to keep costs down. Most innovatively, the board, seeking to provide an alternative to theaters and saloons, provided an evening school program that by 1856 had enrolled nearly fifteen thousand, some four thousand of whom were females, taught in separate classes.
The board’s pedagogical agenda remained that of the old Public School Society—the president announced in 1852 that he sought the “cultivation of habits of ready obedience”—and many of the new ward-school teachers, old PSS veterans, brought along their emphasis on mechanical memorization and Protestant indoctrination. The schools, accordingly, had a mixed record in accessing the immigrant poor. Over half of those registered never showed up, and perhaps fifty thousand went utterly unprovided for. What the institutions did best was protect and encourage children of middle-class character; youths who failed to measure up were weeded out rather than reformed.
The Sunday School Union had its own problems with the immigrant poor, though it did reaffirm (in 1856) its commitment to the “wretched progeny” of the “refuse population of Europe” as well as the “offcast children of American debauchery, drunkenness, and vice.” However, as the union admitted, “our object has always been to reach the masses, but we cannot get to them.” More and more, the Sunday schools became adjuncts of middle-class congregations, and most outposts in the working-class districts were eventually written off as failures.
The era’s most creative educational initiatives were aimed at older youths and adults. In 1846 the Board of Education’s Townsend Harris, a prosperous crockery merchant, proposed establishing a college for those who “have been pupils in the common schools.” It would offer studies relevant for the “active duties of operative life” rather than the classics courses Columbia and NYU considered preparatory for “the Pulpit, Bar, or the Medical profession.” The Free Academy was authorized in 1847 by an act of the legislature, but under pressure from “friends of the present expensive colleges [who] dislike it and are trying to crush it,” its fate was made conditional on winning a referendum.
In a whirlwind thirty-day campaign, Tammany posted placards all over town urging a “Free Academy