A City for Children by Marta Gutman

Author:Marta Gutman [Gutman, Marta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.13. Women distributing pure milk in front of the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, c. 1912. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

EIGHT

Orphaned in Oakland: Institutional Life during the Progressive Era

On September 7, 1905, Arthur J. Pillsbury left California for a trip east. At the request of the governor, George C. Pardee, he planned to visit more than eighty institutions housing orphaned, sick, handicapped, unruly, and otherwise needy boys and girls in the Midwest and the Northeast. Among the organizers of the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, the reform wing of the state’s Republican Party, Pillsbury and Pardee were as determined as any California progressive to free state government from the undue influence of the Southern Pacific Railroad. For Pillsbury, at least, that step was necessary to activate the “New England conscience in government.”1 Another pressing matter also sent him east, one as important to reformers as redeeming government from corporate domination. A political crisis was brewing. The governor faced public outcry about child welfare, with special outrage directed at two separate issues that became intertwined in state politics: the soaring cost to taxpayers of caring for children in private orphanages, and the rampant physical abuse of kids held in state-run reform schools.2 To divert attention from the scandal and toward reform, the progressive cohort in Sacramento sent Pillsbury on this fact-finding mission, to find better models for philanthropic practice elsewhere in the nation.

The governor’s envoy came with useful credentials. Executive secretary to the State Board of Examiners, Pillsbury was born in New Hampshire in 1854; his father, an abolitionist, moved his family to “bleeding” Kansas later that year to join the campaign to make the territory a free state. The younger Pillsbury studied law and, although admitted to the bar, turned to journalism after moving with his wife to California in 1881.3 Since the state’s board of examiners audited the Orphan Fund of California, Pillsbury grasped the central role of government in the state’s mixed economy of social welfare: the board allocated state aid to forty-four orphanages and fifty-eight county boards of supervisors. In 1905 it sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to 7,301 children: 5,283 in orphanages and 2,018 through county supervisors. Another 1,230 children also lived in the state’s orphanages without support from the state government.4 Mindful of the pledge to safeguard children that had been written into the state constitution during the 1879 convention, Pillsbury reminded the public of that responsibility. During his trip he sent the governor informal reports which were polished into press releases and sent to obliging editors who published them in newspapers across the state.5

One year later, Pillsbury summed up his findings in Institutional Life: Its Relations to the State and to the Wards of the State. “In California, dependent childhood is mainly a state problem, as it should be,” he wrote, alluding to the historic pattern of care in the state and the new Progressive ideal of the state as parent.6 Like other reformers, he was willing to abrogate a parent’s traditional right

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