RENEWING CHILDHOOD’S PROMISE
Figure 1. Percent of US Population Living in Cities 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930
Source: US Census Bureau, “Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part I,” www.census.gov/history/www/through_ the_decades/overview/1800.html.
Promoting Child Well-Being Beginning in the 19th century, an evolving series of solutions were implemented, attempting to ensure children’s well-being in a newly configured society. First private and then public, those efforts finally culminated in the passage of Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression. ADC was initiated with the sole aim of promoting poor children’s healthy development by enabling them to be raised at home by their mothers. But it eventually drifted far from that original focus, gradually evolving into the modern welfare state and ultimately the federal child-care programs now in place almost a century later. The 19th-Century Orphanage Movement. Throughout the 19th century, the nation’s rapidly rising number of poor and abandoned children was largely cared for in privately run orphanages. In preindustrial, rural America, the rare orphaned or abandoned child was taken in by relatives or neighbors or boarded out to a nearby family. But by the early 1800s, as orphans first appeared in newly growing cities, a small handful of orphanages 6
began cropping up, supported and run as charities by churches and private citizens. For example, the New York Orphan Asylum Society, one early orphanage in New York City, rented a two-story frame house in Greenwich Village and hired a “pious and respectable man and his wife” as superintendent and matron to carry out a broad mission: “The orphans shall be educated, fed and clothed at the expense of the Society and at the Asylum. They must have religious instruction, moral example, and habits of industry inculcated on their minds.”14 The asylum opened with 12 orphans in 1806 and expanded within a few years to a larger facility housing 200 children.15 Due to rapid urbanization and industrialization, the number of orphanages rose dramatically in the following decades: from just 23 in 1830 to more than 600 orphanages housing 74,000 children in 1880, then doubling to 1,200 orphanages housing 110,000 children in 1916.16 By the height of the Great Depression in the mid-1930s, orphanages were filled to capacity with more than 144,000 children living in “child-care institutions,” as they were called at the time.17 In fact, only a small number of these children were actually orphans.18 Most had at least one parent; usually
