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From: "Irene Landenberger" <>
Subject: Re: [Irish-American] NY's Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum/Protestant Children's Aid Society/"Orphan" Trains
Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 15:56:31 -0500
References: <26e001c5e161$a133c8d0$8b403fce@jean>


Thanks for an excellent overview of the role of Catholic nuns and child welfare. I recently discovered that my sisters in law were put into the care of nuns in Portland, ME until theur Mom got on her feet. This was in the 1910's. Irene
----- Original Message -----
From: Jean R.<mailto:>
To: <mailto:>
Sent: Friday, November 04, 2005 12:03 PM
Subject: [Irish-American] NY's Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum/Protestant Children's Aid Society/"Orphan" Trains


SNIPPET: Irish nuns provided thousands of poor orphans with food, shelter, and an education. Their efforts were the salvation of many Irish-American children, per Maureen FITZGERALD, University of AZ history teacher and author.

Ms. FITZGERALD -- "When historians speak of Irish-American political power in the 19th century they seldom speak of nuns. And yet if one looks at the accomplishments of these women of the Catholic Church in insuring that the children of the poor Irish could be raised as Irish, and Irish Catholics at that, one could hardly discount their role. For it was through their efforts that the fabric of Irish immigrant life, already torn by Famine circumstance and a cold reception in their new land, was kept in one piece. Surely, many of the gains thereafter, whether in politics, in the workplace, in the society generally, are attributable to the generations of the Irish-American children saved by the concerted activities of Irish Cathoic nuns ....

The hundreds of thousands of Famine survivors who landed in NYC were not only terrible poor, sick, and traumatized, but also represented for middle-class Americans the first large-scale influx of profoundly impoverished people into American cities. Reformers, consisting mostly of the native born and Protestant elite accustomed to running the affairs of the city, considered poverty to be a mark of moral failing. Individuals who did not work hard, save money, and discipline themselves properly became poor and stayed poor. Their children, theoretically innocent of their parents' fallen nature, were particularly at risk. As early as 1853, legal mechanisms enabling Protestant reformers to remove children from poor parents, were officially in place.

The truancy law, for example, allowed for any citizen or police officer to arrest a child who was on the streets during school hours. If parents were found, however, they could retain custody by promising to keep the child in school. If they were not found, or if a child was arrested a second time, the child would be committed for the entire length of his or childhood to a Protestant institution, such as the Children's Aid Society. Children, once taken from parents, were to be placed out in a 'Christian home.' The practice of sending urban poor children out to rural Protestant homes in the Midwest -- a process often referred to as 'riding the orphan train' -- rested on the belief that the American Protestant nuclear family, guided by the maternal devotion of the American woman, was the only proper setting for child-rearing in the American republic. No placing-out society run by Protestants in NY would agree to the option of placing a Catholic child in a Catholic home !
un!
til after the turn of the century. This Protestant 'home' and family were to serve as the setting, and Protestant women as the redemptive agents, in poor immigrant children's reform, and 'the family is God's reformatory' became the rallying cry of the Protestant 'child-savers' throughout the century. By the mid-1870s, Catholics estimated the number of children who were taken from parents and shipped to the Midwest to be 10,000 per year from NYC alone.

Irish Catholic nuns were themselves Famine immigrants for the most part. The Sisters of Mercy came to NY from Dublin in 1848, and for the next 20 years funneled most of their charitable resources to single women needing health care, jobs, job training, and protection from sexual assault in the domestic servant positions they took up upon landing at the port of NY. This charity was paid for largely by the work of the female immigrants themselves, and by periodic donations from church collections. Other orders, such as the Sisters of Charity and Sisters of the Good Shepherd, all comprised largely of Irish and Irish-American women, struggled through the Civil War to provide only the most basic services for the poor, as they received no public funding to do so, and the depths of poverty among the Catholic population grew over time. Catholic nuns did not participate much in the many debates of the day about the origins of poverty or the meaning of charity, nor did they pub!
li!
sh a lot of material laying out the principles guiding their charitable worik. Instead, they went to work, and their work was swift and decisive.

The Sisters of Charity in NY's Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum wrote to their board of managers in March 1874 stating, "The accounts that we hear of Catholic orphans sent West ... urge us to make greater exertions in order to take a hundred or so more under our care." Although they complained of current overcrowding, they assured the board that help would follow their resolve: "The sisters unite in desiring this, and for the accomplishing of it, many of our particular friends will come forward to assist." Other convents began taking in children to sleep on the schoolroom floors, in tents outside their convents, and in makeshift buildings of any sort.

In 1875, the NY State legislature passed the Children's Law, intended by leading Protestant reformers to expand the placing-out system and guarantee payment to maintain the children until they were placed out. As a counteractive move, the Catholic Union, a male lobbying group, won support for an amendment stipulating that children be cared for in institutions of their own religious background. The nuns of NYC immediately recognized what passage of this law meant -- masive funding for children's maintenance. And the nuns were quick and aggressive in securing it. The Sisters of Mercy, for example, had been struggling financially to support 150 girls, ages 3-15, in a building that could accommodate 350. Upon passage of the law, their mother superior quickly informed the superintendent of the poor that the Institution of Mercy would 'take charge of any number of little girls at whatever rate the Government proposed.'

The Insitution of Mercy began to receive children committed through the courts in huge numbers, receiving 559 such children in 1878 alone. The Sisters of Mercy then converted a building outside the city to house boys. In 1870, the Sisters of Mercy had been near bankruptcy, supporting charities on less then $10,000 per year. In the single year 1880, they received more than $77,000 from the city, and annual budgets thereafter were comparable.

The example of the Sisters of Mercy's expansion was followed by other Catholic institutions throughout the city. Between 1875-1880, four of the Catholic children's institutions expanded to take in those committed as destitute by the courts. In addition, five completely new Catholic institutions were founded to care for children who earlier might have been sent away to unknown Protestant homes via the so-called orphan trains.

Many native-born activists were soon to protest the rapid expansion of Catholic charitable institutions, contending that they had subverted the principles underlying 'chiod-saving' in several ways. Worse yet, instead of a system controlled almost exclusively by Protestant native-borns and geared toward assimilating Catholic children into the native-born Protestant culture, this system encouraged religious pluralism and the promotion of a distinct Catholic subculture. While native-borns as a group considered this a dangerous promotion of 'sectarianism' and merging of church and state, Catholics defended it as just the opposite -- the separation of Protestant control over the state and a triumphant victory for the religious rights of minorities.

By 1885, Catholic nuns wer rearing 80% of NYC's state-dependent children; they received millions of dollars annually from the city's public funds to do so. The situation in NY, in fact, was often cited by Protesttant elite and middle-class reformers as an example of how dangerous immigrant city political machines could be. Tammany Hall, it was charged, was reponsible for this too-charitable system.

Although the reformers had their moments in the 1890s in their campaign to loosen Tammany's grip, they were never able to dismantle the institutions governing the welfare of children. The system engineered by the Catholic nuns and protected by legislation had become synonymous with public welfare. The 1894 State Constitutional Convention concluded that the state's implicit sanctioning of this system for two decades had in effect established the poor's right to public aid for their children. More than a hundred year later, that long-held right is a matter of public debate ....Ironically, the system that the Irish nuns built and nurtured, once scorned by the elites, is being held out as a model of self-help and private assistance. Few seem to realize that the nuns were funded by government money and, indeed, worked with Tammany Hall to achieve a measure of social justice for the sake of the immigrant poor and their children."

-- Excerpts, "The Irish in America," eds. Coffey and Golway, (1997).




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