Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (Paperback)

by Stephen O'Connor (Author) "I cannot speak of my parents with any certainty at all..." (more)
Key Phrases: orphan train era, orphan train riders, lodging house matrons, New York, Emigration Plan, Charles Loring Brace (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
From 1854 to 1929, an estimated 250,000 children were "emigrated" out of "vice-ridden" urban areas and put up for grabs in the West, where labor was in short supply. Brace (1826-1890) educated himself for the ministry, but under the influence of Darwin and progressive European experiments like the Rauhe Haus, a children's settlement house, he set about saving lives. Rather than work with adults ("saving" prostitutes or banning rum), Brace chose to save their children. As organizer of the Children's Aid Society (CAS), he devised a series of projects to help street kids help themselves: lodging houses, industrial schools and, finally, the infamous "orphan trains." As haphazard and casual as Brace's adoption system may have been, it was the only solution to child abuse and neglect in America at the time. O'Connor intercuts his narrative with the life stories of a few orphan train successes and failures, as if to emphasize that there's no clear verdict on the CAS and what they did. While the book is organized as a biography of Brace, O'Connor digresses compellingly, drawing readers into accounts of rancher warfare, protestant philosophy and Horatio Alger's pedophilia. With a fast-forward to modern times, he reveals that there's nothing new about the crises in what we now call the foster care system. (Feb.) Forecast: From the typeface to the footnotes, this effort is too scholarly for general interest audiences, although it's bound to be required reading for anyone in the social work field.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
Multitudes of street urchins constantly abused or neglected as they struggle for survival--these are images we associate today with urban centers in Third World nations. Yet in the nineteenth century, such horrors were commonplace in most large American and European cities. In mid-nineteenth-century New York, many of these children wound up in prisons or workhouses. Charles Loring Brace strove mightily to save some of these children by providing them with sustenance and then sending them westward by train to families. O'Connor is an author and former New York public school teacher. In this riveting and often heartbreaking account of Brace's successes and failures, he describes the process of adoption, the assumptions behind this massive effort, and the lessons we have learned, or should have learned. Many of the personal accounts of the children and their ultimate fates are both moving and disturbing. This is a very valuable and informative work that must compel us to ponder how we approach seemingly intractable social ills. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (March 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226616673
• ISBN-13: 978-0226616674
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #226,548 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful, informative read, March 9, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (Hardcover)

This is a must-read for anyone interested in the the welfare of poor children today. Orphan Trains traces the history of foster care in this country, and in doing so shows how the U.S. has never put its money where its mouth is when it comes to poor children. The book is a good read, too, because it's full of moving, fascinating stories of the children and their adventures - like a series of Huckleberry Finn stories, only real. O'Connor's prose is clear and yet imagistic, evoking New York at the turn of the century with all its sounds and smells. On every level, this books works splendidly.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting and important book., October 28, 2001

By	"bluemamma" (San Luis Obispo, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (Hardcover)

Some people say you can judge a society by how it treats its weakest members, and if that is true the United States has repeatedly failed the test. When it comes to dealing with the most vulnerable people among us Ñ children whose families can not or will not take care of them Ñ over and over we turn our backs on horrible examples of abuse and neglect.

After reading Orphan Trains, which deals with the origins of the foster care system in the mid-nineteenth century, the first attempts to deal with the problems of children without families, rather than dealing with the problems (primarily crime) that such children created for society, IÕm struck by the fact that this failure is far from a new thing.

Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the ChildrenÕs Aid Society, which found homes for orphans, runaways, and children who had essentially been abandoned by their families, was both an intelligent and a well-intentioned man. Fighting the prejudice of his time, he argued that homeless children were not criminals and threats to society, but potentially upstanding citizens. All they needed was the love and attention of a family. A noble sentiment, but unfortunately Brace mixed it with another noble, but tragically wrong, sentiment. He believed that all middle class families, especially farm families, were good. So he put New York children on trains headed west to be taken in by just about any family that would have them. Many children were adopted by wonderful, caring families, but others ended up as virtual slave labor. Girls were often subject to sexual abuse.

In hindsight, it is easy for us to see the flaws in BraceÕs thinking. But in a fascinating final chapter, Stephen OÕConnor points out that we are making many of the same mistakes today because, like Brace, we donÕt see children who need families as unique individuals. We argue abstractly about whether it is better for a child to stay in a flawed family or be removed to a foster family, when the truth is that there are thousands of factors to take into consideration in each case (of course taking those factors into consideration would require well-trained social workers with small caseloads Ñ which we are unwilling to pay for). We argue about whether a child ought to be placed in a family of his race or ethnic group, or whether any good family is better than none, when the truth is that it depends on the child. Some children feel out of place if they are not in families that look like them; for other children race or ethnicity makes little difference. But to get children to the right place, we need to invest time, and time is expensive.

Whether in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first, good intentions and theories about what is best for children donÕt take the place of seeing children as individuals. As a society, we need to decide if we care enough about children to pay for the time and attention they need.

Orphan Trains has a complex and fascinating story to tell and makes a great contribution to an important national issue.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The origins of the American child welfare system , October 9, 2004

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

There've been plenty of books published selecting Orphan Train children as the protagonists, but relatively few stand-alone volumes consider the origins and social implications of the American child welfare system which emerged in mid-19th century New York to handle to dearth of orphans and runaways on the New York City streets. One man's vision of rescue became the famous Orphan Trains program, and Stephen O'Connor's history and biography focus on one Christian minister Charles Loring Brace, the man who created the Children's Aid Society to handle these children more humanely.