Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 15, No 4
Summer 2001

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

Lesson Plan

Picturing Delinquents, Institutions, and Families

Eric C. Schneider

The photograph included here belongs to the genre of institutional photographs. Such photographs are often found in annual reports or documents produced to record the life of an institution. As such, they are official documents that are unlikely to reveal abuses or negative information. Institutional photographs served the purpose of reassuring the public that their tax dollars or private donations were well spent. They “proved” that things were running as they were supposed to, with both institution and inhabitants well ordered and well cared for. Such photographs, whatever the reasons for their production and preservation, are important documents for historical interpretation. They often provide the only evidence of what an institution looked like or of its daily activities, and they can be read, usually in the context of other documents, to reveal the public face of the institution (1).

I would spend three forty-minute classes on this activity: one on photographs as texts (which could be referred to later as other visual documents are introduced), one on this photo as a document, and one on institutions and family life—particularly childhood and adolescence—at the end of the nineteenth century. Each objective listed below pertains to a specific class. I have outlined suggestions for class activity and homework assignments for each objective.

1. To learn to read photographs as texts.
2. To learn about the history of social welfare.
3. To understand the role of institutions in family life.

I. Overview of photographs as texts. The photograph of boys in uniform lined up in military formation in front of an oversized Victorian farmhouse captures a moment of transformation in the Boston Children’s Aid Society’s Pine Farm and in institutions for delinquent and dependent children more generally. The photograph reveals fascinating juxtapositions between “home,” with its connotations of maternal influence, and “military,” with its masculinist discipline; between “farming,” which was task-driven and involved a preindustrial sense of time, and “drill,” which promised precision and a sense of order; and between “country,” with its implications of Protestant virtue and the equality of a yeoman’s republic, and “industry,” with its taint of urban vice and growing class difference. The photograph captures so much because institutions for children were in flux in the late nineteenth century as they struggled to adapt to changes in middle-class family life and an increasingly industrial America.

Teaching Procedure: In preparation for analyzing this photograph, ask students to bring in a snapshot of themselves in a family setting and perhaps one other family photograph. Pair students and ask them to exchange photographs and to try to interpret them:

1. Who is in the photo?
2. What was the occasion on which the picture was taken?
3. What was the purpose of the photograph?
4. Does the photo convey any emotion, or can the emotions of the participants be surmised?
5. What are different people wearing? Does their clothing tell us anything about them?
6. Who might the photographer have been?

Have students write a paragraph interpreting each other’s photos, guessing at their meaning, and then discussing their interpretations. Once students are comfortable analyzing “common” images, introduce less common ones, such as the one of Pine Farm included here. I would show students this photograph at the end of the first lesson and then ask them to write an interpretation of the photograph, using questions such as those outlined above, as homework.

II. Overview of social welfare institutions. Institutions&emdash;almshouses, workhouses, orphanages, reform schools&emdash;were at the heart of social welfare organization in nineteenth-century America. Although the policy was never successfully implemented, institutions were supposed to replace “outdoor” relief&emdash;that is, charity or “welfare” delivered to one’s home (2). But institutions were expensive: expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and driven by a relentless need for economy. One reason for the inmate labor that is frequently represented in institutional photographs (and which is perhaps represented by the pruned trees in this one) was simply to reduce the cost of maintaining the place. By the end of the nineteenth century, social welfare reformers had become more leery of institutions, their costs and their purpose, and more interested in preserving families and preventing institutionalization. Pine Farm illustrates this history.

Pine Farm, established in 1864 in Newton, Massachusetts, near the city of Boston, was the typical product of a mid-nineteenth-century movement to create “family style” or “farm style” institutions. Reformers rejected the large “congregate” asylums built earlier in the century, which allowed children to form an oppositional culture and where order was maintained only with harsh discipline&emdash;as periodic scandals revealed (3). Family-style asylums were located in the country and emphasized farm labor and interaction with nature, which was thought to be inherently reformative of delinquent or wayward children. Children tended garden plots; planted, weeded, and cared for the fields; fixed fences; and did chores. This was not only needed upkeep but also “reformative.” In the words of child-saver Charles Loring Brace, labor in the soil was “medicinal” for the diseased minds of urban delinquents (4).

Pine Farm had a “father,” who ran the farm, and a “mother,” who ran the household and whose maternalism was a key influence in taming boys’ “wild natures.” Besides doing household chores and farm labor, the boys spent several hours each morning learning lessons—reading, writing, and arithmetic—and they attended Sunday services together. According to visiting committees that filed monthly reports with the Children’s Aid Society, the couple stressed reason in disciplining boys and relied on the affectionate models of child rearing that one might find in a middle-class family. Punishments included missing dessert, confinement in bed, and exclusion from the “family circle” rather than physical chastisements. There were no walls or locked rooms, and runaways were accepted as the price for maintaining a family-style institution. Boys’ letters, carefully pinned to their files and sent years after they had “graduated,” and their occasional visits on Thanksgiving and other holidays, suggest that the domestic atmosphere of Pine Farm was more than a rhetorical flourish. Stays at Pine Farm were short; boys remained an average of sixteen months before receiving placements into farm families or returning to relatives. Reformers hoped that adolescents would become farmers after spending several years in a farm family, or would at least return to urban life better equipped to handle its temptations.

By the 1890s, when this photograph was probably taken, the model of domestic reform that underlay the family-style institution had changed. Family-style institutions no longer seemed very family-like, and the emerging profession of social work criticized them as artificial and urged that children be placed in “natural” families. Social welfare agencies, including the Children’s Aid Society, reinterpreted domestic reform and increasingly tried to keep families together or emphasized placing younger children into “foster families” without a period of training in an institution. For the more “progressive” child-savers, the reign of the institution was over, at least for women and younger children.

But adolescent boys were harder to deal with. (Adolescent girls, on the other hand, were eagerly sought as domestic servants in middle-class urban families, and family placement promised to preserve their virtue until marriage.) Older forms of family life, in which apprentices and boarders might live in someone’s home, gave way to nuclear families unwilling to house potentially troublesome strangers. Equally important was the decline of the farming economy. Massachusetts was the most industrialized state in the country; and fewer farmers sought the additional help of a Pine Farm boy at harvest or planting time. The boys themselves were uninterested in farming and requested different training and placements. Pine Farm introduced military drill, “physical culture,” and wood working, which taught the precision and attention to detail that an urbanized workforce needed, but the new regimen clashed with the domestic and rural ideology that had infused Pine Farm. Older boys accumulated at the farm and presented greater discipline problems for the institution. The managers segregated and classified the boys and created a more regimented institutional culture. Bells rang at 6:15 to signal the start of the day and periodically thereafter to indicate shifts in schedule from chores to school to work to drill. There seemed to be less and less difference between Pine Farm and the public reformatories to which it had contrasted itself, and the atmosphere of an oversized family had largely disappeared. Realizing how far the institution had strayed from the original conception, the Children’s Aid Society voted to close Pine Farm in 1894 (5).

Unlike Pine Farm, other institutions did not disappear. Increasingly, social welfare agencies worked with children and families in noninstitutional settings, but orphanages and reformatories continued to be founded. The public reformatories remained at the punitive heart of the juvenile justice system and incarcerated those children and adolescents who failed to respond to social workers, foster families, or to less restrictive environments.

Teaching Procedure: The second class should revolve around the students’ written interpretations of the photograph. A series of questions about the photograph will help spark class discussion. The teacher might prompt the class by pointing out that, despite wearing uniforms and standing at attention, this is a rather ragtag group. Was this a military-style institution? They might notice the absence of any walls or enclosures and the absence of any adult. Is this a reformatory? Who is commanding these boys to stand so proudly? They might speculate as to who else was present. Pruned trees in the foreground and outbuildings in the back suggest agricultural functions. Did these boys work on the farm? The large dog lolling on the ground and the laundry hanging on a line fits with the domestic image of the main building. What do these boys do when they are not on parade? Where did they go to school? Students might wonder why there are only boys here and if the differences in size suggest an age range. Why are there so few younger children, and what might happen to the older ones? And what conclusions can be drawn from the observation that the group, while integrated, is overwhelmingly white?

During the discussion, keep track of students’ responses on the classroom blackboard. Once students have speculated about the photograph, fill them in on the history of Pine Farm. In the third class, move on to discussing social welfare institutions and family life. To prepare for the class, students should read the local newspaper for the past week or so and look for articles about children and criminal justice or children and welfare.

III. Overview of institutions and family life. Family disruption and potential delinquency, rather than criminal activity, led to placement in Pine Farm. About half of the boys sent to Pine Farm had lived with a single parent, a handful were orphaned, and others came from families with step-parents. Parents and relatives dispersed children to institutions in order to be relieved, at least temporarily, of an economic and emotional burden or to keep children from falling into vice or crime. Students will certainly be aware of family disruption or of children living in single-parent households. But today the causes of these events are different: family disruption occurs with divorce, and single parenthood is associated with the dramatic increase in births out of wedlock since the 1960s. In nineteenth-century America, family disruption occurred more commonly because of death, the high rate of industrial accidents, the frequency of unemployment, or the desertion of a spouse. Families were fragile; Americans were mobile; immigrants had family networks scattered over two continents; and poor families were especially vulnerable to downturns in the economy.

Teaching Procedure: Students, when examining the Pine Farm photograph, will wonder what sort of place this was, who these children were, and how they got to Pine Farm. Ask students to bring their research on contemporary children’s issues to bear on a discussion of institutions and family life.

1. What family “events” might have led to these boys’ placement at Pine Farm?
2. How does society care for children from disrupted families today? What do the differences in approach suggest?
3. How have industrialization and urbanization changed children’s lives and their upbringing?
4. If children from a foster family or in a group home today posed for a photograph, what might look different? Would anything be the same?
5. What would a photograph of “delinquents” look like? What comparisons can be made to the boys in this picture?

In addition to discussion, the teacher might organize a debate on one or both of these questions: Did removing children from disrupted families and placing them in institutions and/or foster care protect them, or did it threaten to sever emotional ties to a surviving parent and siblings? Should standards appropriate for middle-class children be applied to the working class and the poor?

This lesson would fit well following a section on industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth century, and the analysis of the photograph could lead into a class on Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and the reform photographers of the Progressive Era. Building on this lesson, students could be asked to contrast the different purposes of institutional and reform photographs.

The very indeterminacy of the photograph of boys at Pine Farm makes it an intriguing document. By learning to read it, students can gain a better understanding of how to assemble and compare different types of evidence. They can think about what is present, speculate about what is only hinted at, and consider what other documents they might want in order to tell the story of these boys.

1. On interpreting institutional photographs, see George W. Dowdall and Janet Golden, “Photographs as Data: An Analysis of Images from a Mental Hospital,” Qualitative Sociology 12 (Summer 1989): 183-213.

2. Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

3. David J. Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).

4. Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them (1872; reprint, Montclair, NJ: P. Smith, 1967), 400.

5. For a full account, see Eric C. Schneider, In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s (New York: New York University Press, 1992), chap. 3.

Ashby, LeRoy. Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997.

Dulberger, Judith A. “Mother donit fore the best”: Correspondence of a Nineteenth-century Orphan Asylum. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Graff, Harvey J. Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Hasci, Timothy A. Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Schneider, Eric C. In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s. New York: New York University Press, 1992.

Teachers who wish to find images, or who might wish to assign their students to create photo essays, should be sure to consult the American Memory web site at the Library of Congress: <http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/>.

Eric C. Schneider is an assistant dean and associate director for academic affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s (1992); and Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (1999). He is currently writing a social history of heroin and its impact on the postwar American city.