Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

by Andrea Elliott

New York’s street children had drawn the notice of Charles Loring Brace, a twenty-six-year-old Protestant minister, educated at Yale, who came to be known as the father of American foster care. Brace believed that even a temporary home, in a rural setting, was better than the street. In Manhattan, he founded the Children’s Aid Society, launching a movement to “place out” New York’s street children by sending them on “orphan trains” to live with families in the Midwest. As many as two hundred thousand children boarded these trains for a new life. America’s first foster children were leaving white “ignorant Roman-Catholic” families, in Brace’s words, to live with Protestant farmers who could offer “a good home in the West.” Yet many of these children worked in arrangements reeking of indentured servitude. By Brace’s lights, the orphan train movement was “emigration as a cure for pauperism.” Most of these children were not even orphans. They had been taken from, or handed over by, parents too poor to feed them. Society’s answer to poverty, time and again, was to separate children from their families. By the early twentieth century, about 93,000 children were living in orphanages and as many as 75,000 more in foster homes or facilities for juvenile delinquents. Considering this a crisis, President Theodore Roosevelt called a meeting that would lay the foundations of America’s modern welfare system. On January 25, 1909, some two hundred charity workers, academics, juvenile cour...