A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare , by Kenneth Cmiel, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 249 pages, $24.95
The Home: A Memoir of Growing Up in an Orphanage, by Richard McKenzie, New York: Basic Books, 228 pages, $23.00
Although orphanages may owe their 15 minutes of recent fame to Newt Gingrich's passing reference on a Sunday morning talk show, asylums as way stations for abandoned or neglected children are not a new idea. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau deposited all five of his children in a foundling home, and declared that he was doing them a favor. Sources trace orphanages at least as far back as eighth-century Milan, and abandoned children were commonly ho used for the long haul in "hospitals" in 12th-century Europe.
In A Home of Another Kind, Kenneth Cmiel, a history professor at the University of Iowa, informs us that the first recent appeal for the revival of the orphanage here in America can be traced not to Gingrich but to a 1988 article published in The Washington Monthly by Lois Forer, a retired judge of the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia. Forer's call to action was a response to what she had been witnessing in her own court with increasing frequency. "Given the flood of horribly abused children who were becoming wards of the state, she argued, and given the well-documented inadequacies of the foster care system, the way to do better was to bring back the orphanage," explains Cmiel.
He notes that in the 1980s, "the number of children without a stable home exploded." Crack cocaine played a significant part in the growth of what are now called the "no parent" children--children who are muddling through with sub-adequate parenting. The rise in the number of children who received out-of-home institutional care rose from 262,000 in 1982 to 442,000 10 years later.
This appalling state of affairs raises the question that was on Gingrich's mind when he proposed that we take another look at orphanages: What should we do with a growing population of children living in families that seem to be utterly unprepared to care for them? Cmiel's book and Richard McKenzie's memoir The Home put that question (and the Gingrich-Forer solution) into historical and personal contexts.
A Home of Another Kindtells the story of how the nature and objectives of orphanages in America changed over the last century. Because Cmiel takes the vantage point of a single institution, the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, his book is at once history and drama. It is also a cautionary tale in which readers allergic to oversight agencies of either the public or private kind will take some perverse pleasure. What began as an independent, efficient haven for children in need of temporary custodial care metamorphosed into a state-supported monitoring agency of the very sort that discredited the American orphanage system.
The Homeis economist Richard McKenzie's personal appeal to take another look at the orphanage as a legitimate solution to the problem of functionally homeless children. After his mother committed suicide and his chronically drunk and unemployed father failed to take care of him, McKenzie's maternal aunts placed him in an orphanage. "In the emerging debate over what to do with parentless, neglected, abused, or abandoned children in our midst," he observes, "no one has thought to ask orphans themselves, the children who were there, what they think about their years in the orphanage."
A Home of Another Kind follows the activities of the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum from the mid-1800s to 1984 when the orphanage, now called Chapin Hall, finally closed its doors. Cmiel charts changes in the nature of the Asylum's clientele, its ideas about what kinds of children need help, and its views regarding what kinds of help are most appropriate. The Asylum and similar institutions remade themselves in response to a sustained effort by first bureaucratic and then academic reformers to professionalize welfare services.
In the late 19th century, places like the Asylum were managed by middle-class female volunteers who were in control of the daily decisions and activities of the institutions. They knew the family circumstances of each of the children, they were involved in each individual case, and they trusted their own instincts in setting policy. Such hands-on engagement, however, was "exactly the zone that welfare professionals tried to empty when they attacked volunteerism in the early decades of the twentieth century." By the end of the 1920s, the Asylum's managers depended on experts with degrees in social work to set the direction of the institution. This professionalization of welfare radically altered and eventually all but eliminated traditional orphanages.
It also subjected children and their families to erratic policy changes dictated by the latest fashionable psychologizing, all of which would soon be discarded in favor of a newer, trendier theory. The picture that emerges from Cmiel's story is one of frequently fluctua ting policies and redefinitions of orphanages that twist and turn back on themselves and often do more harm than good.
In the 19th century, orphanages tended to be autonomous institutions in the business of providing housing for children whose families were suffering some kind of temporary dislocation. As Cmiel notes, the idea of the orphanage of the 1800s was to give parents with insufficient income to keep a home together some "breathing space to get back on their feet." Surprisingly, perhaps more than half of the children living in the Asylum in the late 1800s had two parents, and most children housed in 19th-century orphanages still had at least one living parent. Such orphanages were not meant to be permanent homes for children.
Indeed, the Asylum was originally nothing more than a day-care center for the children of working mothers. Even after the Asylum had been converted into a residential institution, most youngsters stayed less than six months and 86 percent stayed less than two years. By the early 1900s, things had changed. Using money as a carrot for the orphanages, privately run Progressive clearinghouses like the Community Fund bought increasing influence on the way that welfare was managed in Chicago.
Reformist agencies began to exert leverage on places like the Asylum by centralizing the welfare system. While channeling placements through single agencies reduced burdens on parents, it also meant that they had less personal control over where their children ended up. And, says Cmiel, it meant that children with indifferent parents might be "passed from one agency to another by a 'caring' but bureaucratic system."
Other parents actually found themselves battling with the system for custody of their own children. The effect was to diminish the role of parents as custodians of their own sons and daughters.
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