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A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare ReviewWhen one thinks of orphanages, Oliver Twist asking "Can I have some more, please?" comes to mind. So does the image of the orphanage as a giant warehouse packed to the rafters with filthy children cowering under the harsh glare of psychotic social workers. Kenneth Cmiel's "A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare" does much to refute this view. Certainly, some orphanages were cesspools that mistreated their charges, but most genuinely tried to assist the children under their care. Cmiel's book, through the use of a plethora of source materials--including orphanage records, government documents, and personal interviews-- successfully charts the changing course of child welfare by looking at the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum from its founding in 1860 to its reorganization as a research center in 1984. Most importantly, he uses his findings to trace the changing attitudes regarding the care of dependent and delinquent children in the country at large.The author discovers that the early years of the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, from 1860 to roughly 1900, were a time of private, religion based assistance. The people that ran the institution on a daily basis were Protestant, wealthy, and female. They lived near the asylum, which meant that they took a personal interest in the condition of the institution and the children living there. The women running the orphanage also helped raise the funds necessary to operate the building on a yearly basis. Children chosen to live in the asylum came from working class families undergoing some sort of catastrophic upheaval, disasters that left one or both of the parents needing someone to watch their offspring while they put their family back together again. As a result, children in the orphanage during the early years of its existence rarely lived there very long. Progressive ideas about childcare, which began in earnest after 1900, sought to change the practices of the asylum by creating a unified network of facilities dependent upon citywide umbrella organizations that disbursed both funds and the latest social service theories. While successful in some areas, these Progressive ideas failed to gain power over Chicago area orphanages and asylums because privately owned facilities refused to give up control.
The Great Depression, World War II, and the post-war period saw public funding increase from a trickle to a flood. With the boost in public funding came rules and regulations that severely curtailed the traditional authority of the private managing boards. The Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, now known as Chapin Hall as a result of a new facility built with donated funds, gradually turned over control of the organization to the professionally trained staff. The institution also went on the public dole, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). With public money came new responsibilities, primarily rejecting dependent kids in favor of delinquent children with a host of emotional and physical problems. Chapin Hall became a "residential treatment facility" staffed with dozens of highly trained professionals working intensively with the youths. When the state government began a policy of "deinstitutionalization" in the 1970s, a policy that sought to remove as many children from public orphanages and asylums as possible, Chapin Hall failed to respond to the new reality and closed after running deep deficits for several years. The institution reopened as a children's research center under the ownership of the University of Chicago.
Cmiel's book is a wonderful work because it succeeds in personalizing the history of the Chicago orphanage. The author consistently brings to the foreground the personal elements of social history that are often lost in lengthy descriptions of changing policies, power struggles, and theories on childcare. The reader gains a very real sense of what it was like to live in an asylum. For instance, Cmiel describes how the children living in the orphanage in the late nineteenth century, both male and female, had their heads shaved in order to prevent lice. And the descriptions of youths with serious mental and emotional problems in the later years of the orphanage, children abandoned by their parents and left to languish at Chapin Hall for years, brought tears to the eyes of this reader. It is rare for a history book to elicit this sort of reaction. Arguably the most surprising element in the book concerns the process of deinstitutionalization, and who started that process. Conservatives usually shoulder the blame for closing down hospitals, mental asylums, and other shelters. But Cmiel's research points the finger at liberals coming into power in the 1970s. They supported reducing the number of children in institutions with programs designed to keep kids at home or in small group houses scattered throughout the city. It was only later that Republicans signed on to the policies when they too discovered the amount of money the state would save in the process. It seems there is enough guilt to go around for both parties.
It is difficult to find problems with Cmiel's study due to the excellent research and strict parameters of the study. Yet there are a few areas that could use additional explanation or elaboration. For example, at several points in the narrative the author contends that Catholic facilities eluded Progressive efforts to exert financial and operational control far longer than most of the city's other institutions. Not until the DCFS pumped massive amounts of money into privately controlled facilities did the Catholics turn over control. Why were Catholic operations impervious to the earlier Progressive attempts to unite Chicago's childcare institutions under a broad operational umbrella when others were not? Was Catholic unity the reason these asylums resisted change for so long? Or was it something else? If it was the latter, could the Protestant organizations like Chapin Hall have done something similar and thus explored other options to keep control of their institution, if even for awhile longer?
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