Thrown on the Cold Charity of the World: Kansas Cares for Its Orphans, 1859-1919

Abstract

This dissertation examines the role special interest politics played in securing tax-supported funding of child welfare services by local and state governments. The study begins in the mid-1850s, when Irish immigrants began to influence New York City politics, insuring municipal funding for Catholic orphan asylums, while fighting Protestant reformers determined to ride destitute immigrant children of their foreign customs and Catholic religion. My research examined the second year of the Civil War, when Pennsylvania became the first state to assure the care and education of children because early Union losses cut recruitment levels, compelling state officials to make these guarantees to Union Army recruits, who may not return home. The study then pointed to a strong voting bloc and state house connections that Kansas Civil War veterans used in 1885 to insist that the orphaned children of their wartime colleagues and those fallen on hard times gain state support. These historically significant occurrences expose the chilling affects of politics on Irish immigration, the western emigration of New York's Catholic children to Midwestern Protestant communities, legislation benefiting Union veterans, and Progressive Era reforms implemented for social control rather than alleviating poverty. This research proves that special interest groups controlled the lives of orphaned and dependent children, influencing their place in a new standardized American society of social control and suppressed behavior. The timeframe for this dissertation begins in 1859 when three suddenly orphaned children became the responsibility of a Kansas community, moves into the intervening decades of the last half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and concludes when the Spanish Influenza forced Kansas lawmakers in 1919 to implement strict regulations of religious orphanages and children's homes. My research utilizes accumulative cause and effect data that build into my conclusions centered on outcomes-based analysis. This dissertation examines the motivation of social workers, government officials and reformers caring for orphaned and dependent children, challenging the perception that alleviating poverty was their sole motivation. The conclusions of this study find that the political mandates of special interest groups ruled decisions made at all levels of government, within the management of private charities and among leaders in small communities. Among those decisions stood the desire to control destitute children, and mold them eventually into acceptable American adults. This research looked closely into the care of destitute children in New York, Pennsylvania and Kansas, revealing similar child welfare systems that developed under the influence of special interest politics