Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [625]
Brace also dissented sharply from the AICP approach. The street urchin, Brace agreed, having “grown up ignorant of moral principle as any savage or Indian,” would eventually “poison society,” yet while fearing those he called “barbarians” and “street rats” Brace also admired the “independence and manly vigor” of the newsboys, bootblacks, match sellers, even the petty thieves. Their creative entrepreneurial energy suggested they might be little businessmen in the making—if only they could be instilled with a ” ‘sense of property,’ and the desire of accumulation, which, economists tell us, is the base of all civilization.”
Clearly the first step was to isolate urchins from their working-class milieu—the “engine runners, cock fighters, pugilists, and pickpockets,” the “low theatres, to which he is passionately attached,” the “vicious career of [his] parents.” But the next step, Brace insisted, was not to place them in asylums or schools, whose obsession with “drilled and machine-like” conformity would only break their spirit and render them “unused to struggle.”
The better solution was to extract them from the city altogether and ship them off to the interior, where they would be boarded in “kind Christian homes in the country.” This would submit them to the moral tutelage of some pure woman: “No influence, we believe, is like the influence of a Home.” It would also set them to work, having the additional advantage of sending “laborers where they are in demand” while relieving “the over-crowded market in the cities.” Clumped in New York, the children were a festering menace; dispersed over the continent, their individualism and opportunism could be put to good account.
To this end, in 1853 Brace set up the Children’s Aid Society, on Astor Place on Fourth Avenue (near the headquarters of the AICP and the YMCA). At first, after screening both children and potential families, it shipped youths to farms in the nearby countryside. Later, when the railroad system penetrated deeper into the interior, they were sent all the way to Illinois, Michigan, and Iowa. By 1860 the society had placed out 5,074.
Brace’s approach attracted a good deal of support from socially prominent merchants, bankers, and lawyers (though not, despite some help from the Unitarians, from the ministerial community, a sign of the growing secularization of the reform movement). Working people were of a more mixed mind. The program had its appeals: enterprising youths were attracted to its promise of a western adventure; emigration schemes were in the air; and the Irish, in particular, were well accustomed to seasonal migrations of adolescents as farm laborers and domestic servants. On the other hand, there was a widespread (and often justified) sense that the children were being exploited as cheap labor by shrewd western farmers. And unlike the land reformers’ voluntary homesteading plan, the Children’s Aid Society approach had the unappealing aspect of something done to one. Moreover, just as African Americans had long resisted Colonization Society efforts to “solve” the racial problem by deporting them en masse, Catholics vigorously resented a policy that seemed, in the words of the Freeman’s Journal, to be “seizing them in the name of charity and of religion, and carrying them away to be brought up aliens to the Catholic faith.”1
The New York Archdiocese, accordingly, redoubled its own children-saving efforts. By 1858 the assets of its massive parochial school system