Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [920]
COS inveighed too against the city’s policy of providing emergency housing in verminous police station basements, lest encouraging the shiftless in their idleness set the working poor a bad example. Lowell’s group was never able to choke off the practice altogether—Tammany police were unwilling to give up their supply of voters—but it did get the legislature, in 1886, to authorize establishment of a Municipal Lodging House (on First Avenue) which would give food and a night’s lodging (no more than three times in any one month) in return for labor in the COS wood yard. As a corollary, police stations within one mile of the house were forbidden to provide shelter.
“The task of dealing with the poor and degraded has become a science,” said Lowell with some satisfaction—but problems remained. There was the ongoing sniping from those who called COS the “Society for the Suppression of Benevolence.” There was the contradiction between their goal, of restoring the poor to independence, and their method, of granting relief only to those who did as they were told. There was also a dismaying lack of heroic women volunteers—the requirement of being both loving friend and prying investigator put some people off—forcing the COS to resort to paid agents. The biggest problem, however, lay in dealing with the children of the “poor and degraded.”
SAVE THE CHILDREN
More than ever—given the new “scientific” literature on the heritability of crime, poverty, insanity, and drunkenness—the Protestant welfare establishment was determined to prevent poor and working-class parents from passing on their lax morals and distaste for work to their offspring. “To keep such families together,” wrote charity reformer Charles Hoyt, “is contrary to sound policy; the sooner they can be separated and broken up, the better it will be for the children and for society at large”—a view endorsed officially by the Protestant female reformers of the State Charities Aid Association (SCAA) in 1879.
Charles Loring Brace and his Children’s Aid Society (CAS) had continued doing their best in this regard. By the mid-1890s Brace had dispatched over ninety thousand poor children to Protestant homes in the Midwest so American women could raise them in proper surroundings. CAS surveys reported these children were happily growing into independent adulthood—though in fact a disturbing number seemed to be wending their way back to New York and reestablishing relations with their families.
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) was empowered to take more definitive action than Brace’s group could. A spinoff of Henry Bergh’s old American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the SPCC had been established in 1874 by ASPCA lawyer Elbridge Gerry. An all-male, all-elite, and overwhelmingly Protestant organization, it searched out children deemed neglected or abused, prosecuted the parents, and turned the youths over to an appropriate agency (after 1881 it was given actual law enforcement power).
The problem lay in finding an appropriate agency. In the old days, such youths would have been consigned to an institution like the almshouse or the House of Refuge, but asylums had fallen out of favor. Rather than educating and redeeming their youthful charges, they were now believed to expose them to further degradation. Indeed, in 1875 the SCAA had won passage of a Children’s Act removing all two-to-sixteen-year-olds from poorhouses. In large measure the law was aimed at parents who, after public outdoor relief was terminated, began entering poorhouses with their children, thus maintaining their negative influence.