Second Section

To be honest, I am not entirely happy with this section. It has a simple goal: to set the work that comes in the context of the fluctuating nature of family and of children in the nineteenth century. I feel like I need either some evidence or some further discussions of other writers (literature review). But I don’t want to turn this section into something too big either. Anyway, pointers, advice, criticism, reassurance, whatever you think--post it up in the comments. The third section will be up soon, and it is probably more fun to read, since it’s mostly a biography of Brace...

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        I have argued that self-reliance is the way in which Emersonian democratic friendship tries to break down the divides of like, which we can define as ways in which one person is like another and yet divided from still others, and where the line of demarcation is often based on some affective connection. These could be divides of race and ethnicity, of class, of gender, or, as is the focus in this chapter, of kinship, of family, and they are policed--enforced and established--by the possibility of emotional connections. I feel my obligation to my sister, and so we are alike. I see you, says Whitman, “face to face,” but the reality, for Whitman as much as for most nineteenth century Americans is that there are some faces that are seen and some that are occluded. Emersonian democratic friendship attempts to break down these divides of like by focusing on how a self-reliant individual is not solely swayed by affective ties of intimacy but is able to maintain the broad-ranging affiliations necessary for a national, heterogeneous democracy. Entering, as it did, into a world full of some kinds of affiliations and hostile to others, Emersonian democratic friendship sought a way to educate and train Americans to be truly self-reliant and thus truly able to establish relationships, friendships, across that which held Americans apart. This chapter’s focus is both on the work of Charles Loring Brace and the CAS to teaching and training children, particularly boys, in a manner consistent with Emersonian democratic friendship and on how Brace and the CAS performed that work through a reconstruction of the notion of family--by breaking down one divide of like: kinship.

        We will look shortly at Brace’s life and the specific tasks of the Children’s Aid Society of New York City, but for now I want to think about how Brace’s efforts in New York City are part of a larger movement to produce citizens of a certain kind in the nineteenth century. We could call this effort to produce the citizen the problem of democratic subjectivity, and it was powerfully felt by a republic with both expanding national boundaries and expanding internal constituencies from immigration, abolition, and expanding suffrage. Recently democratic subjectivity has received broad scholarly interest, often through the lenses of masculinity and whiteness studies. This twin focus on whiteness and masculinity conceives of modern citizenship “as a quality of relation: as an affect or attachment, a feeling of mutual belonging that somehow transpires between strangers,” as Coviello puts it. Much recent work on democratic subjectivity is done so in the effort to explain just how Melville can say that the post-war nation is a unified through what he calls in Battle-Pieces a “natural brotherood” of white northern and southern men. These men, according to Melville, are brothers despite being strangers, and natural brothers at that--there is no coercion in their affective affiliation for they are family.

(needs work. Not sure what else needs to go here, if anything. Feel like this section is both necessary and full of unnecessary junk)

        Charles Loring Brace and the CAS used Emersonian democratic friendship, particularly notions of self-reliance, to participate in the larger discourse of democratic subjectivity, not only by producing a particular notion of white manhood, nor entirely by producing a particular notion of capitalist citizenship, but by establishing, promulgating, and shepherding a notion of what it is to be a boy. The concept of the boy, as proto-citizen, has a long history in American letters. Dana Nelson, in National Manhood, her study of democratic subjectivity, draws her readers attention to Benjamin Rush’s 1798 treatise, “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” both to underscore the historical connection between educating boys and democratic subjectivity and to demonstrate how “Rush’s plan works structurally to reroute anxieties about national unity and sameness into the psychological interior of the American boy/man,” who must come to synthesize the competing and contradictory demands of “self, family, market, and national interest in his own person” (12). The role of education, according to Rush, is to “convert men into republican machines,” and Nelson is disturbed by the unintended consequences of producing these republican machines (92). This work builds off of Nelson’s by considering the way that Rush’s plan is modified over the course of the nineteenth century through contact with sentimental notions of childhood. That is, as national manhood becomes professionalized, it might move away from the area of the boy, leaving open a space for a new sort of democratic subjectivity to take root.

        Consider how 38 years after Rush published his essay, in 1836, Massachusetts passed the first state child labor law, dramatically refiguring notions of childhood, labor, and professionalization. By the time that the CAS formed in 1853, social reformers were promoting a “right to childhood” across the nation and motivating depictions of overworked and exploited children to reform local and national laws. This work culminated in two events early in the twentieth century. In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt called the first White House Conference on Children, which ratified Charles Brace’s conclusion in the 1850s that “home life” is the best place for dependent children. Then, in 1912 the Children’s Bureau was formed by Congress to enforce the Sheppard-Towner act, which granted funds that states could use to support children’s health and welfare. “According to [the historian K.] Lindenmeyer, establishment of the Children’s Bureau meant that: ‘the effort to protect a right to childhood was now elevated from sentimentalized local charity work to national policy’” (Kahan 58).

        The work of Charles Loring Brace and the CAS took place in the midst of this shift in the conception of childhood. This shift moved from considering young boys (Rush refers to them as simply “men”) as proto-republican machines to defending a romantic view of the unencumbered state of childhood. Brace clearly considered the targets of his charity work as future citizens (and current workers, as we shall see), but his work was also involved in the similar work of sentimental literatures that participate in a discourse that Kenneth Kidd has identified as that of “boy farming” or “boyology.” “Boyology” is, according to Kidd, more than just the study of “boy education and management” that “flourished from the 1860s through the 1920s,” but is also the science of producing a certain kind of citizen, where citizenship is figured through the trope of the boy (148). For Emerson, Brace, and other “boyologists” like Rush the boy is father to the man, but another poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson figures importantly in both the work of the CAS and that of other boyologists. Kidd argues that “the cornerstone of boy farming is the Emersonian program of self-reliance,” and with the work of the CAS we have a unique window through which to view the workings of the discourse of self-reliance in specific and general efforts to produce the new subjects of the republic (151). Furthermore, boyology is connected with a larger sentimental literature that includes the “bad boy” books of the late nineteenth century and their depictions of idealized rural childhoods, and even works like Huckleberry Finn, a book that we should remember as contemporaneous with the orphan trains. When Huck made his way out to the “territory,” he might have encountered a few orphan train riders newly arrived from New York City.

        For most of the history of the republic, the production of democratic subjects was the function of the family, aided and restricted in certain ways by various extra-familial apparatuses, certainly, but the production of citizens was quite literally a “family” matter. In fact, Rush suggests that boys will be better educated at home in a family setting than in a school with their peers because the family will teach them about the proper organization of a smoothly functioning society (or should we say a smoothly functioning patriarchy) while too much contact with their peers will tend to produce bad habits. And yet, we know that Rush lost that particular battle first to the movement towards the common school system and then with the movement towards compulsory education, which became a national obligation by 1918. Boy farming, however, reflects the development in the mid to late nineteenth century of a whole host of extra-familial influences on the production of citizens. Processes of industrialization and standardization that are affecting the economic and social life of Americans are reaching down into the family and fracturing and reconfiguring its nature.

         There is, then, a newfound willingness on the part of nineteenth century Americans to allow extra-familial influences on the production of their young citizens. But there is also a new willingness to reconfigure family. Brace and the CAS are best known for the “orphan trains” that sent children like Charley Miller to live with adoptive families, and it is adoption that unleashes the power of friendship to modify the family. In 1851, just two years before the CAS began operations, Massachussets passed The Adoption of Children Act, the first modern adoption law. This statute required judges to consider the child’s welfare, making the interests of the child a concern for the child’s legal status for the first time. This development of the institution of adoption and its codification in statute had profound affects on the American family. Writing about Maria Cummins’ The Lamplighter, an 1854 novel centered around the serial informal adoptions of a young girl named Gerty, Cindy Weinstein argues that the novel “produces a paradigm of family based on chosen affections rather than biologically determined ones” (45). Weinstein identifies the middle part of the nineteenth century as a “cultural moment in which the language, procedures, and meanings of adoption are being negotiated, in which the outlines of the family are being questioned and reestablished” (65).

        Gerty found more happiness than did Charley Miller, but they both were engaged in efforts to reconstruct the discourse of family in the United States, to make possible true “adoptions.” Brace, the CAS, and Cummins were thinking through the many and multiple ways in which subjects are produced outside of the biological family. As we will see, Brace even tried to go around the family by appealing directly to children as self-reliant individuals, but the CAS, though its emigration programs and the orphan trains, primarily hoped, as Brace writes, to “touch habits of life and the inner forces which form character” by refiguring the “families” in which these poor children lived and the manner in which they lived (The Dangerous Classes 23). During these efforts, they took some of the first steps towards establishing full legal adoption in the United States, thus connecting, through a rhetoric of self-reliance, the wider discourse of democratic subjectivity with this discourse of family and individuality. This chapter is an effort to pull apart those various discourses and how they affected the work and writing of Charles Loring Brace and the CAS. My hope is that an examination of the ways in which Emersonian democratic friendship here presented itself through a discourse of self-reliance will illuminate Brace and the CAS’s efforts to modify and rework American understandings of family and democratic subjectivity. As part of the larger project of Emersonian democratic friendship, Brace tried to create a new kind of democratic subject--in this particular case, a subject who can stand both outside and within traditional discourses of kinship and citizenship.