Charles Loring Brace

For the 21st century American anthropologist, see C. Loring Brace.

Charles Loring Brace
Charles Loring Brace
Born	Charles Loring Brace June 19, 1826 (1826-06-19) Litchfield, Connecticut, U.S.
Died	August 11, 1890 (1890-08-12) (aged 64)
Nationality	American
Education	Yale College (B.A. 1846)
Occupation	Philanthropist
Relatives	Charles Loring Brace Jr. (Yale, 1876) Gerald Warner Brace (grandson) C. Loring Brace IV (great-grandson)

Charles Loring Brace (June 19, 1826 – August 11, 1890) was an American philanthropist who contributed to the field of social reform. He is considered a father of the modern foster care movement and was most renowned for starting the Orphan Train movement of the mid-19th century, and for founding Children's Aid Society.

Early life

Brace was born on June 19, 1826 in Litchfield, Connecticut. He was named after his uncle, the lawyer Charles Greeley Loring, defender of fugitive slave Thomas Sims, His mother died when he was 14, and he was raised by his father, a history teacher.

Education

He graduated from Yale College in 1846. He pursued divinity and theology graduate studies at Yale, but left to study at Union Theological Seminary, from which he received his graduate degree in 1849. He was drawn to New York because it was viewed as the center of American Protestantism and social activity. His best friend, Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect, also lived in New York.

Career

In 1852, at the age of 26, Brace, who had been raised as a Calvinist, was serving as a minister to the poor of Blackwell's Island (now known as Roosevelt Island) and to the poor of the Five Points Mission, when he decided he wanted to pursue his humanitarian efforts in the streets rather than in church. Brace was aware of the impoverished lives of the children in New York City and for this reason he concentrated on improving children’s situations and their future. In 1853, Brace established the Children's Aid Society.

File:Charles Loring Brace - Aged 29.jpg

Charles Loring Brace, aged 29 years

In 1854, the Society opened the first of its "newsboys' lodging-houses", which would become one of Brace's most successful projects. Theses houses provided basic room and board at low prices to homeless children who hawked newspapers on the streets of American cities. Though Brace viewed the newsboys as children in need of the services provided by the houses, they also inspired several of Horatio Alger's stories in which the newsboys' independence and pluck is rewarded with great wealth.

Brace witnessed many children in New York City who lived in poverty with parents who abused alcohol, engaged in criminal activity, and were otherwise unfit parents. Many of these unwanted kids had been in trouble with the law. Such was the severity of child poverty in 1854 that the number of homeless children in New York City was estimated as high as 34,000. The police referred to these children as “street rats”.

According to an essay written by Brace in 1872, one crime and poverty ridden area around Tenth Avenue was referred to as “Misery Row”. Misery Row was considered to be a main breeding ground of crime and poverty, and an inevitable "fever nest” where disease spread easily. Other children who were orphans or runaways found themselves drifting into this destitute area, as well as the old sheds of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Streets.

Orphan asylums and almshouses were the only "social services" available for poor and homeless children. Brace did not believe that these were worthwhile institutions because they merely served the purpose of feeding the poor and providing handouts. He felt that such institutions only deepened the dependence of the poor on charity. Brace was also influenced by the writings of Edward Livingstone, a pioneer in prison reform who believed that the best way to deal with crime and poverty was to prevent it. Brace focused on finding jobs and training for poor and destitute children so they could help themselves. His initial efforts in social reform included free kindergartens, free dental clinics, job placement, training programs, reading rooms, and lodging houses for boys.

Fostering and the "Orphan Trains"

Main article: Orphan Train

Brace endeavored to place children into farm families of northern New York State, the Midwest and, after the American Civil War, some southern and a few western states. From 1853 to 1864, 384 children were sent each year to families in New England states, the North Atlantic states and East North Central states. Nearly 1,000 children per year were sent from 1865 1874 to Michigan, Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri through Brace's "Emigration Plan”, now known as "The Orphan Trains". "In every American community, especially in a western one, there are many spare places at the table of life," Brace wrote. "They have enough for themselves and the stranger too."

The arrangements for placing orphan children varied. Sometimes they were pre-ordered by couples; at other times a local screening committee tried to make sure the children would be given to good parents; at other times the scene was more random.

Brace received special discounts on fares for the orphan children from the railroads. Whole coaches were sometimes filled with these kids. Prior to departure, they were bathed, given new clothes, a coat, often a Bible, and reminded of good manners. The trains transported children from lodging houses, orphanages, private homes or the street, bringing them to towns where local organizers had created interest in the program. Notices were posted around town and in newspapers, informing locals when the children would arrive and of the viewing location. The Children's Aid Society (CAS) made arrangements with train companies for the children (in groups ranging in size from three to 35, along with at least two adult agents) to travel in regular passenger coaches, not in wooden box cars as is sometimes depicted in novels. At towns along the route, the children assembled at the train station or were brought to opera houses, schools, or town halls for the community to meet and interview.

Emigration Plan

Brace's Emigration Plan was also an anti-eugenic movement because Brace believed that one's "gemmules" (an early, pre-genetic concept that blood carried a family's heritability and character) did not predetermine one's future. Brace was deeply moved by Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, having read it thirteen times. Brace was also an outspoken abolitionist. In a bold move (and perhaps inspired by his abolitionist and Darwinian mindset), Brace did away with the centuries-old custom of indenture so that the "placed" children were allowed to leave a home if they were uncomfortable with the placement. Brace’s vision of migrating children to live with the western Christian farming families was widely supported by wealthy New York families – the first $50 was given by Mrs. John Astor in 1853.

The Children's Aid Society (CAS), the best-known organization finding homes for children, made efforts to screen the host families and follow up on the welfare of placed children. By 1909, at the first White House Conference on Dependent Children, the country's top social reformers praised the CAS' emigration movement, but argued that children should either be kept with their natal families or, if they were removed as a result of parental neglect or abuse, every effort should be made to place the child in a foster home nearby. In a report in 1910, the Children’s Aid Society estimated that 87 percent of children placed by the Orphan Train program had done well. While there was occasional abuse, most people agreed that over all, the children were generally better off than on the streets of big cities without proper food, clothing and shelter.

By 1920, the CAS and approximately 1500 other agencies and institutions had placed approximately 150,000 children in the largest migration or resettlement of children in American history. The CAS' Orphan Train movement ended in 1929, 75 years after it had begun as a social experiment.

To this day, Brace is honored and revered for his compassionate work with the street children of New York City. He helped 400,000 children with the orphan train.

Brace served as an executive secretary of Children's Aid Society for 37 years, overseeing the program. He died in 1890 from Bright's disease. After his death, the Brace Memorial Farm was created for street children to learn farm skills, manners, and personal social skills to help prepare them for life on their own. His memoirs were published in 1872 under the title "The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them" (ISBN 1402181493).

Personal life

On August 21, 1854 he married Letitia Neill in Belfast, Ireland, who proved to be a great support to her husband’s social reform efforts. Letitia's father, Robert Neill, was an avid abolitionist and he opened his home to some of the world's most famous anti-slavery orators, including Frederick Douglass. He died at Campfer, Tirol, on August 11, 1890.

Family includes son, Charles Loring Brace Jr. (Yale, 1876) and CAS board secretary, grandson, Gerald Warner Brace (1901–1978) American writer, educator, sailor and boat builder, and great-grandson, C. Loring Brace IV (born 1930), American biological anthropologist and doctor.

Legacy

Kirby Page wrote in Jesus or Christianity, A Study in Contrasts (1929) quoting from Brace's Gesta Christ:

There was an appalling amount of misery and injustice throughout the regions where the expansion of Christianity was most rapid. ...The stage of that era was often highly indecent. "The exhibition of licentious shows and immoral plays, says C. L. Brace, "had a profound influence. The extremes to which they were carried cannot ever be explained in modern writings. In fact, few classical scholars who have not waded through the disgusting mire of a large part of Roman literature can have even an idea of the depth of obscenity and immorality which it reached."

In popular culture

• Kate Manning's My Notorious Life (2014) predominantly features early 1800's orphans as main characters, who get selected on the street amongst children who must prostitute themselves for food, by Charles Loring Brace for the Orphan Train, and eventually become Lake Shore Drive (Chicago) and Fifth Avenue residents.
• The book "Last Train Home, an orphan train story" by Renée Wendinger, is a historical novella describing the methods by which children were placed West by the Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling following the lives of two children of the train.ISBN 978-0-9913603-1-4
• The book "Extra! Extra! The Orphan Trains and Newsboys of New York" by Renée Wendinger, is an unabridged nonfiction resource book and pictorial history about the orphan trains. ISBN 978-0-615-29755-2
• The song by Utah Phillips called "Orphan Train" has been performed by numerous modern bluegrass singers.
• The book Gratefully Yours describes a nine-year-old girl's feelings about her new family who adopt her from the orphan train.
• There is a ballet entitled Orphan Train presented by Covenant Ballet Theatre of Brooklyn, which tells the story of Brace and shows stories of orphans on the train. It is choreographed by Marla Hirokawa.
• Authors Al and Joanna Lacy have written an Orphan Trains Trilogy, depicting the lives of fictional orphans.
• The ballad "Rider On An Orphan Train", written by David Massengill, describes the inevitable tragedy of the separation of siblings in spite of the efforts to keep brothers and sisters together.
• The book Train to Somewhere by Eve Bunting describes a fictional account of a girl's journey on the Orphan Train.

See also

• Timeline of children's rights in the United States

Further reading

• , a one-hour documentary film based on exclusive access to the CAS archives using original research: Brace's diaries, letters from children, agents and interviews with "riders."

External links

• Works by Charles Loring Brace at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Charles Loring Brace at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• The Children's Aid Society
• Orphans' stories