The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood by Martin Kristen

Author:Martin, Kristen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2025-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

In the early 1900s, when foster care held promise as a Progressive solution for deinstitutionalizing “orphans,” the federal government created the first agency devoted to child welfare: the Children’s Bureau. The bureau had been unanimously proposed at the 1909 White House Conference, but it took eleven introductions of bills calling for its establishment before Congress finally passed one in January 1912; President William Howard Taft signed it into law in April of that year.

The federal government’s first bureaucratic and financial foray into taking responsibility for the welfare of all American children—not just the Native children whose lives it had long been upending—thus came 136 years after our country’s founding. But at its start, the Children’s Bureau had limited power.5 The initial budget was only $25,640, and only fifteen people were on staff.6 And by design, the bureau was originally limited to research and reporting—not active policy or grant making to actually change conditions for children. The law that established the bureau called for it to “investigate and report upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life,” especially “infant mortality, the birth rate, orphanages, juvenile courts, desertion, dangerous occupations, accidents and diseases of children, employment, and legislation affecting children in the several States and Territories.”7 Notably, foster care, which was still in its infancy at the time, was not on the list.

The bureau’s small size, budget, and purchase on power seems related to the fact that it constituted a pink ghetto within the federal government. Women dominated the bureau’s staff from its earliest years—Julia Lathrop, a former Hull-House resident, was chief from 1912 to 1921 and prioritized hiring fellow women.8 But even with this leadership, the bureau was caught in the same bind as female-dominated social work: the struggle to prove that its work was indeed professional and not just an extension of maternal instinct.9

Under its second chief, Grace Abbott, another Hull-House alumna, the Children’s Bureau began to study and report on foster care, providing guidance for the private and public organizations that oversaw foster placements. In 1923, the Children’s Bureau published Foster-Home Care for Dependent Children, with chapters like “The Essentials of Placement in Free Family Homes” and “Special Problems Involved in Foster-Home Care,” written by experts who primarily worked for private charities.10 The publication also included a history of child placing, which was, in the 1920s, beginning to shift away from crowded orphanages and the haphazard indenture practices of orphan trains to a process that was, at least in theory, driven by the careful science of social casework.

While some experts and legislators were adamantly opposed to the public funding of private sectarian child welfare charities, just as orphanages had been primarily run by such charities, foster care placements were often overseen by them too. Public-private partnerships were unavoidable, since the charities that had long taken on the responsibilities of child welfare were reluctant to give up their power—and the state and local money they stood to make by continuing to care for vulnerable children. A

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