Elites, subalterns, and American identities: A case study of African-American benevolence

American Historical Review

Volumn 109, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 1104-1139

  Sengupta, Gunja ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33644593012     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/530751     Document Type: Article

References (253)

1. Marjorie C. Snevily to H. Hollingsworth Wood, September 5, and October 17, 1918, Howard Orphanage and Industrial School, Records, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York (hereafter, HOIS). Wood, a white Quaker lawyer, became President of the Orphanage in 1913. In order to protect the privacy of Howard alumni and their families, I have used pseudonyms for all of them mentioned in the text. In the notes, I have identified letters written to and by them by citing their initials rather than their full names. Anne Smith's true initials were M. J. Her demographic details may be found in the Thirteenth Census of the United States (1910) for the Borough of Brooklyn under entries for the Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. Before entering the Snevily home, M. J. was placed with the family of a Brooklyn real estate broker named D. S. Willis who promised to send her to school. When the Willises reneged on their promise on the ground that M. J. was "so backward in her work that it required every minute of her time ... to do her lessons ... she of course could never become a teacher," the Orphanage Superintendent Mary Gordon removed her from the Willis home. See letter by D. S. Willis to Wood, n.d., HOIS. For an institutional history of the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School, see Carlton Mabee, "Charity in Travail: Two Orphan Asylums For Blacks," New York History 55 (January 1974): 55-77.
2. Marjorie Snevily to Wood, November 1918 (no day), HOIS.
3. See chapter three, entitled "Putting on Style," in Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1985).
4. As the historian Gary Gerstle has argued in American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J., 2001), two competing nationalisms shaped Progressive America's schizophrenic sense of "self." President Theodore Roosevelt imagined a masculinized, racialized nation forged in the crucible of war, one that promised the rights of American citizenship to all European men, no matter what their national origin, as long as they acculturated to "American" norms in a democratic capitalist order divided between what Matthew Frye Jacobson calls "whiteness and its others." Yet Roosevelt's America was shaped not by racial nationalism alone but also embraced a version of civic nationalism that offered - at least in theory - equality of opportunity and freedom to all regardless of color or creed. One racialized the promise of American exceptionalism, the other opened up that promise to all individuals regardless of race, nationality, religion or, it could be argued, gender.
5. My understanding and use of the term "multipositional," based on Earl Lewis's discussion of that concept in "To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas," American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 783, is developed in greater detail later in the essay.
6. See also Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York, 1998).
7. On the notion of the bipolar construction of society into "whiteness and its others," see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
8. Lewis, "To Turn as on a Pivot," 783. Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has also pointed out that the "apparent overdeterminancy" of race in the United States has eclipsed not only other categories of social relations like gender but also the interrelationships among these categories.
9. See Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 251-74,
10. reprinted in Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed, eds., We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women's History (New York, 1995), 5.
11. See the essays in the AHA Forum, American Historical Review 99 (December 1994): 1475-1545,
12. as follows: Gyan Prakash, "Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism," 1475-90;
13. Florencia E. Mallon, "The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History," 1491-1515;
14. Frederick Cooper, "Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History," 1516-45.
15. For reflections on the connections between African-American history and studies of colonialism, see Kevin Gaines, "Rethinking Race and Class in African-American Struggles for Equality, 1885-1941," AHR Forum, American Historical Review 102 (April 1997): 378-79.
16. William Roseberry, "Hegemony and the Language of Contention," in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, N.C., 1994), 360-61.
17. See also Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London, 1986);
18. Daniel Nugent and Ana Maria Alonso, "Multiple Selective Traditions in Agrarian Reform and Agrarian Struggle: Popular Culture and State Formation in the Ejido of Namiquipa, Chihuahua," in Joseph and Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation, 209-246.
19. Florencia E. Mallon, "Time on the Wheel: Cycles of Revisionism and the 'New Cultural History'," Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (May 1999): 339-40.
20. See also Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 85-92.
21. Cooper, "Conflict and Conection," 1534.
22. Mallon, "The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies," 1511.
23. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London, 1998), 240.
24. Lewis, "To Turn as on a Pivot," 783-84.
25. On the materiality of such "meaningful" discursive frameworks, see Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, "Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico," in Joseph and Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation, 20;
26. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London, 1980), 38. In this context, situational subaltern perspectives on hegemony encourage us to think of "languages" or "modes" of representation more expansively than those of literary texts implied in the all too familiar debate over whether "experience" or "epistemology" should be the guiding principle of the historian's enterprise.
27. For a good summary of this debate (with its implications for subaltern agency), see Regina Kunzel, "Pulp Fiction and Problem Girls: Reading and Writing Single Pregnancy in the Post-War United States," American Historical Review 100 (December 1995): 1471-73.
28. See also the exchange between Joan W. Scott and Linda Gordon over reviews of Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York, 1988),
29. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988),
30. in Signs 15 (Summer 1990): 848-59;
31. Christine Stansell, "A Response to Joan Scott," International Labor and Working Class History No. 31 (Spring 1987): 24-29;
32. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 773-97.
33. For a critique of the "linguistic left" on the ground that it ignores the agency of the dominated, see Steven Watts, "The Idiocy of American Studies: Poststructuralism, Language and Politics in the Age of Self-Fulfillment," American Quarterly 43 (December 1991): 625-60,
34. and responses by Barry Shank in "A Reply to Steven Watts' Idiocy," American Quarterly 44 (September 1992): 439-448;
35. by Nancy Isenberg, "The Personal is Political: Gender, Feminism and the Politics of Discourse Theory," American Quarterly 44 (September 1992): 449-458.
36. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has explored the relationship between words and the world that created them in "Writing History: Language, Class, and Gender," in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington, 1986)
37. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985).
38. Obviously, my assertion about the dearth of works from subaltern perspectives does not apply to African-American history outside the realm of social welfare. The literature on slavery, the black migration, the African-American working class, and black political activism offers some of the finest examples of U.S. histories "from the bottom up." This corpus is too voluminous to enumerate. For examples, see Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977);
39. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994)
40. Tera Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). Work on private philanthropy by minorities (both religious and racial) has contributed to adjustments in the definition and periodization of social welfare history so as to collapse the neat chronological and intellectual boundaries between benevolence (conceived as private/evangelical/ nineteenth century) on the one hand, and social welfare (thought to be statist/professionalized/post-1890s) on the other. For instance, historians have noted that black women bereft of government influence established privately funded voluntary associations dating back to colonial times. These organizations not only provided African Americans with services denied them by whites, such as homes for the aged, the infirm, and unwed mothers, kindergartens, libraries, and settlement homes, but in the late nineteenth century also addressed problems of special concern to the black community such as lynching, rape, and the convict-lease system in the South. Moreover we have been reminded that the black vision of welfare differed from that of whites, so that the inclusion of black perspectives has produced a far more nuanced portrait of American reform than existed before.
41. In this context, Linda Gordon, in "Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women's Welfare Activism, 1890-1945," Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 559-90, has argued that African-American women welfare activists held a structural view of poverty's origins, supported universal rather than means and morals-tested public service, made racial uplift an important goal, were tolerant of wage-earning mothers, and sustained a discourse against rape to protect women from sexual exploitation. Orphanages run by religious minorities like Catholics and Jews were similar in some respects to black orphanages in terms of their internal class relations, their commitment to a combination of uplift, cultural preservation and Americanization, and their relationship with a sometimes hostile world.
42. See for example Reena Sigman Friedman, These are Our Children: Jewish Orphanages in the United States, 1880-1925 (Hanover, N.H., 1994).
43. On Jewish orphanages see also Hyman Bogen, The Luckiest Orphans: A History of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York (Chicago, 1992);
44. Jules Doneson, Deeds of Love: A History of the Jewish Foster Home and Orphan Asylum of Philadelphia (New York, 1996);
45. Howard Goldstein, The Home on Gorham Street and the Voices of its Children (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1996);
46. Ira A. Greenberg, Richard G. Safran, and Sam George Arcus, eds., The Hebrew National Orphan Home: Memories of Orphanage Life (Wesport, Conn., 2001).
47. Yet there were also significant differences. For example, Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, in The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), have shown that some Catholic charities regarded the practice of benevolence as a sort of meritorious service that would lead to the salvation of the providers' souls. I would also point out that the rigid construction of supposedly inalienable racial differences in American society, the acute financial challenges faced by black voluntary associations, and the unique historical experiences of African Americans lent the internal and external negotiations of black orphanages a very distinctive meaning on political, cultural, and personal levels. These issues emerge throughout my discussion of the implications of "whiteness" discourse for black subaltern identity formation, as well as my argument about the intimate familial (but hierarchical) character of the Howard Orphanage.
48. On black orphanages see Sandra M. O' Donnell, "The Care of Dependent African-American Children in Chicago: The Struggle Between Black Self-Help and Professionalism," Journal of Social History 27 (1994): 763-776.
49. Timothy A. Hacsi's Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998) is a sweeping institutional study of orphanages in general.
50. See also Kenneth Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago, 1995);
51. Nurith Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Philadelphia, 1994);
52. David R. Contosta, Philadelphia's Progressive Orphanage: The Carson Valley School (University Park, Pa., 1997).
53. On the more recent history of race and child welfare, see Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York, 2002);
54. Sondra Jackson and Sheryl Brissett-Chapman, Serving African-American Children: Child Welfare Perspectives (New Brunswick, N.J., 1999);
55. Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
56. A tiny sample of works on African-American philanthropy and activism includes David Levering Lewis, ed., W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader (New York, 1995);
57. Nancy Hewitt, Southern Discomfort: Women's Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s (Urbana, Ill., 2001);
58. Craig Steven Wilder, In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African-American Culture in New York City (New York, 2001);
59. Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago, 2003);
60. Ann F. Scott, "Most Invisible of All: Black Women's Voluntary Associations," Journal of Southern History 56 (February 1990): 3-22;
61. W.E.B. Du Bois, ed., Efforts For Social Betterment Among American Negro Americans (Atlanta, 1909);
62. Lester Brooks, Blacks in the City: A History of the National Urban League (Boston, 1971);
63. Elsa Barkley Brown, "Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke," Signs 14 (Spring 1989): 610-33;
64. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993),
65. "Religion, Politics and Gender: The Leadership of Nannie Helen Burroughs," Journal of Religious Thought 44 (Winter/Spring 1988): 7-22;
66. Darlene Clark Hine, "'We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible': The Philanthropic Work of Black Women," in Kathleen D. McCarthy, ed., Lady Bountiful Revisited: Philanthropy and Power (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990);
67. Stephanie J. Shaw, "Black Club Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women," Journal of Women's History 3 (Fall 1991): 10-25;
68. Beverley Washington Jones, Quest For Equality: The Life and Writings of Mary Eliza Church Terrett, 1863-1954 (New York, 1990);
69. Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1989);
70. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1984);
71. Iris Carlton-La Ney, "The Career of Birdye Henrietta Haynes, A Pioneer Settlement House Worker," Social Science Review 68 (1994): 254-73;
72. Emma Jones Lapsansky, "'Discipline to the Mind': Philadelphia's Banneker Institute, 1854-1872," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 117 (1993): 83-102;
73. Inabel Burns Lindsay, "Some Contributions of Negroes to Welfare Services, 1865-1900," Journal of Negro Education 25 (Winter 1956): 15-24;
74. Edyth L. Ross, ed., Black Heritage in Social Welfare, 1860-1930 (Metuchen, N.J., 1978);
75. Ralph E. Luker, "Missions, Institutional Churches, and Settlement Houses: The Black Experience, 1885-1910," Journal of Negro History 69 (Summer/Fall 1984): 101-13;
76. Dorothy C. Salem, To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform, 1890-1920 (Brooklyn, N.Y. 1990);
77. Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer (Athens, Ga, 1989);
78. Claude F. Jacobs, "Benevolent Societies of New Orleans Blacks during the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," Louisiana History 29 (Winter 1988): 21-33;
79. Kathleen C. Berkeley, "'Colored Ladies Also Contributed': Black Women's Activities From Benevolence to Social Welfare, 1866-1896," in Walter J. Fraser, Jr., Frank Saunders, Jr., and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds., The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family and Education (Athens, Ga., 1985), 181-203;
80. Earline Rae Ferguson, "The Women's Improvement Club of Indianapolis: Black Women Pioneers in Tuberculosis Work, 1903-1938," Indiana Magazine of History 84 (September 1988): 237-61;
81. Marilyn Dell Brady, "Kansas Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, 1900-1930," Kansas History 9 (Spring 1986): 19-30;
82. Linda Marie Perkins, Black Feminism and 'Race Uplift,' 1890-1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981);
83. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, "Building in Many Places: Multiple Commitments and Ideologies in Black Women's Community Work," in Ann Bookman and Sandra Morgan, eds., Work and the Politics of Empowerment (Philadelphia, 1988), 53-76;
84. Dorothy Sterling Black Foremothers (New York, 1979);
85. Sharon Harley, "For the Good of the Family and Race; Gender, Work and Domestic Roles in the Black Community, 1880-1930," Signs 15 (Winter 1990): 336-49;
86. Lillian S. Williams, "And Still I Rise: Black Women and Reform, Buffalo, New York, 1900-1940," Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 14 (1990): 7-33;
87. Gail Bederman, "'Civilization' and the Decline of Middle-Class Manliness and Ida B. Wells's Antilynching Campaign, 1892-94," Radical History Review 52 (Winter 1992): 4-30.
88. On the definition and periodization of welfare history, see Linda Gordon, "Black and White Visions of Welfare";
89. Clarke A. Chambers, "'Uphill All the Way': Reflections on the Course and Study of Welfare History," Social Science Review 66 (1992): 492-504,
90. "Toward a Redefinition of Welfare History," Journal of American History 73 (September 1986): 407-33.
91. Michael B. Katz has shown that policy toward the poor blurred the lines between private and public since colonial times. See Katz, Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as History (Princeton, 1995),
92. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986),
93. The Undeserving Poor From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York, 1989).
94. Scholars of "maternalist politics" have also drawn attention to the nebulous boundary between private and public by showing that women's benevolent associations were also theaters for framing and implementing social welfare policies and programs. See for instance Seth Kovan and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York, 1993)
95. and the papers on "Maternalism as a Paradigm" prepared for the 1992 Social Science History Association meeting and published in The Journal of Women's History 5 (Fall 1993): 95-131.
96. A tiny sample of the literature on welfare and the "underclass" question includes Katz, ed., The "Underclass" Debate: Views From History (New Jersey, 1993);
97. Peter Mandler, ed., The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis (Philadelphia, 1990);
98. Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State (New York, 1974);
99. James T. Patterson, America 's Struggle With Poverty, 1900-1985 (rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1986);
100. Mimi Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy From Colonial Times to the Present (Boston, 1988);
101. Joel Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, The Moral Construction of Poverty: Welfare Reform in America (Newbury Park, 1991);
102. Beverly Stadum, Poor Women and Their Families: Hard Working Charity Cases, 1900-1930 (Albany, 1992);
103. Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (New York, 1992);
104. Marilyn Wood Hill, Their Sisters' Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830-1870 (Berkeley, Calif., 1993).
105. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 137;
106. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham, N.C., 1997), 15.
107. I understand "cultural texts" to mean modes of communication and socialization characterized by an elasticity of meaning that varies from context to context.
108. J. Victor Koschmann, "The Nationalism of Cultural Uniqueness," review essay on Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, 1996) in American Historical Review 102 (June 1997): 762.
109. On the racial meaning of republicanism, see Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 25, 26.
110. On republican thought see also Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984), 14;
111. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975);
112. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969);
113. Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 11-38.
114. For the gendered meaning of republicanism in the South see Stephanie McCurry, "The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina," Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1245-1264.
115. Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151-74.
116. On the "cult of domesticity" see also Katharine Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, 1973);
117. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: Women's Sphere in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, Conn., 1977);
118. Linda Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Woman's History," Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9-39;
119. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, 1990);
120. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (repr., Urbana, Ill., 1987);
121. Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct; Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle-Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, England, 1981).
122. On the "Jezebel" stereotype of black women, see Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985).
123. For a recent transatlantic perspective on immigration, see Tyler Anbinder, "From Famine to Five Points: Lord Landsdowne's Irish Tenants Encounter North America's Most Notorious Slum," American Historical Review 107 (April 2002): 351-387.
124. On attempts to Americanize Progressive era immigrants, see Gary Gerstle, "Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans," Journal of American History 84 (September 1997): 524-558;
125. John J. Bukowczyk, "The Transformation of Working-Class Ethnicity: Corporate Control, Americanization, and the Polish Immigrant Middle-Class in Bayonne, New Jersey, 1915-1925," Labor History 25 (Winter 1984): 53-82;
126. Kerby A. Miller, "Class, Culture, and Immigrant Group Identity in the United States: The Case of Irish and American Ethnicity," in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology and Politics (New York, 1990), 96-129;
127. Gerd Korman, "Americanization at the Factory Gate," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 18 (April 1965): 396-419;
128. Stephen Meyer, "Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory, 1914-1921," Journal of Social History 14 (Fall 1980): 67-82;
129. George F. Pozetta, ed., Americanzation, Social Control, Philanthropy (New York, 1991).
130. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 139-170.
131. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, 1998).
132. Faced with a society divided between undifferentiated whiteness "and its others," European immigrants seeking to acculturate had long had to become "white," whether by joining labor unions, participating in minstrels and race riots, wearing ready-made clothing, or supporting America's adventures with empire from the antebellum age of "Manifest Destiny" to the days of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Significant examples of "whiteness" studies and the racial acculturation of European immigrants to the United States also include David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York, 1991, repr., 2000);
133. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995).
134. References to critical race theory's treatment of "whiteness" as an analytical category occurs in Sarah Laslett's review of Daniel Bernardi, ed., The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema (New Brunswick, N.J., 1996)
135. Jesse Algeron Rhines, Black Film/White Money (New Brunswick, N.J., 1996)
136. in Journal of American History 84 (December 1997): 1138.
137. See also Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters (Minneapolis, 1993);
138. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London, 1994);
139. John Hartigan, Jr., Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (New Jersey, 1999);
140. Angela Woollacott, "'All This is the Empire, I Told Myself': Australian Women's Voyages 'Home' and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness," American Historical Review 102 (October 1997): 1003-1029.
141. For an evaluation of "whiteness studies," see Peter Kolchin, "Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America," Journal of American History 89 (June 2002): 154-173.
142. Mabee, "Charity in Travail," 55-77;
143. Review Covering Forty-Five Years of Work of the Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum (hereafter cited as Review), 8-15, HOIS;
144. Brooklyn Eagle, March 20, 1913.
145. On the African Civilization Society, see August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto (repr., New York, 1976), 152, 174.
146. Sarah Tillman's profession is, curiously enough, listed as "Intelligence" in Trow's New York City Directory, Volume LXXIX For the Year Ending May 1, 1866 (New York, 1866), New York Public Library. In October 1870, Tillman left New York. The same year, the orphanage appointed William F. Johnson as superintendent. Johnson was said to "grope" his way about numerous towns and villages, spending wakeful nights out in the cold when denied accommodations, scouring churches and other institutions for aid. In 1884, the institution moved to a newly erected, larger complex at the corner of Dean Street and Troy Avenue in Brooklyn.
147. The names of the pre-1902 officers and managers occur in the Seventeenth Annual Report of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum of the City of Brooklyn, Dean Street, near Troy Avenue, For the Year Ending September 30, 1885, New York Public Library.
148. Information on three of the officers' professions is available in Trow's New York City Directory Volume XCVIII For the Year Ending May 1, 1885 (New York, 1885), New York Public Library. In 1885, the organization's First Directress, Mrs. L. A. Cooper, was listed in the directory simply as "widow," while both its Second Directress H. E. Thompson, a single woman, and its Treasurer and Corresponding Secretary Augusta Johnson, a married woman, were classified as laundresses.
149. One white minister complained that Howard's policy of keeping its board of managers all black alienated white donors. In 1896 for instance, the white-run Colored Orphan Asylum reported total receipts of over $47,000, while the HOIS could claim only $17,666. See Annual Report of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum - Brooklyn to the State Board of Charities, Albany, New York, for the fiscal year ending September 30, 1896; Annual Report of the Colored Orphan Asylum and Association for Benefit of Colored Children, New York to the State Board for the same year, both in Annual Reports of Orphan Asylums and Homes for the Friendless, 1873-1896, Records of the State Board of Charities, in New York State Archives.
150. On stereotypes of black incompetence in benevolence management, see O' Donnell, "The Care of Dependent African-American Children in Chicago," 769.
151. The new board of managers that took over in 1902 consisted of eleven gentlemen representing six black churches and five white ones. The Women's Auxiliary established in 1904 visited, sewed for, and provisioned the children in various ways. Josephine W. Whitlatch, a sixty-year-old white widow and member of the Dutch Reformed Church, led the auxiliary. See Review, 7-19.
152. For evidence about Wood's relationship with Booker T. Washington, see Washington to Wood, August 5, October 1 and 20, 1913; November 13 and 18, 1913; May 17, 1915; Wood to Washington, November 18, 1913; Wood to C. M. Pratt, December 31, 1913, all in HOIS. Ida Tarbell refused to let the orphanage use her name as one of its patrons at its 1915 annual benefit on the ground that she had "found it necessary to make the rule not to give my name to any cause which I have not personally investigated." See Tarbell to Wood, March 19, 1915. On the role of the State Board of Charities in prompting the switch to a "cottage system" at King's Park, see "Workers' Facts," a one-page printed sheet in HOIS. The Amsterdam News, March 28, 1913, contained information on the following members of Howard's new board of managers: whites included Wood; Clinton Rossiter, Vice President of the Brooklyn Trust Company, banker and philanthropist; Alfred Whitman of the banking firm of Knauth, Nachod and Kuhne, a trustee of Manassas School for Colored Youth and member of the NAACP; Willard Bayliss, lawyer and real estate expert; Mansfield B. Snevily, manager of the Oil Seed Company; Edgar McDonald, president of the Nassau Bank; and Carolena M. Wood, the president's sister and First Directress of the New York Colored Orphan Asylum at Riverdale-on-Hudson. The black managers included W. H. Brooks, pastor of St. Marks Methodist Episcopal Church; W. M. Moss, pastor of Concord Baptist Church; E. P. Roberts, a physician and examining doctor for the Board of Education; S. W. Simms, pastor of Holy Trinity Church; and O. M. Waller, physician. The HOIS records contain stray references to the friction among the institution's African-American trustees on the eve of as well as on the occasion of the change in management in 1913, yet they are silent on the details of the dispute. A letter written by Mary Gordon, who became Howard's matron in 1902 and its superintendent in 1914, to Wood is an example: "I tried to treat Mr. Trotman (a black real estate broker and later Howard manager) with courtesy even when he spoke as he did concerning the past efforts of the Institution. I knew he did not know what he was talking about ... I do know that many of the best people of both races have worked for the institution. In both races there are jealousies and disgruntled factions who pull apart. There is no such thing as perfect union and harmony among all of the people - we can only hope to blend certain ones as certain notes in a chord." (Mary Gordon to Wood, April 16, 1914, HOIS). The Report of General Inspection of the HOIS by the Bureau of Institutional Inspection, Department of Public Charities of the City of New York (hereafter City Inspection Report), February 1917, HOIS stated that the farm consisted of 31 cows, 12 horses, 19 sheep, approximately 100 pigs, and 300 chickens of various breeds. The main building, 8 cottages, a school, an infirmary, artisan workshops and barns clustered near the center of the grounds, with the detention house situated about one mile from the rest of the buildings, (p. 16-17).
153. O'Donnell, "The Care of Dependent African-American Children in Chicago," 763. An anonymous reader for the AHR drew my attention to the "subalternity," if you will, of the white directors themselves in relation to a hostile world with no faith in black voluntarism.
154. Annual Report of the Board of Managers and Trustees of the Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, October 1905 to October 1906, New York Public Library, 19.
155. As Michael Katz has written, the movement against institutions was inspired in part by developments in evolutionary biology and child psychology combined with technological advances and the availability of cheap immigrant labor. These factors led to the cultural invention of childhood as a distinct stage in the life cycle, and of children as emotionally valuable persons (rather than economic assets) who deserved to be nurtured in private families by mothers who stayed home. The cottage system was designed to replace the congregate living associated with institutions with the virtues of private family life, including more individualized child care. See Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 118-119.
156. Review, 51-52.
157. On the black migration and/or urban experience in the North, see Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York, 1966);
158. James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989);
159. Nell Irvin Painter, Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (New York, 1976);
160. James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion and Folklore in the City, 1850-1970 (Urbana, Ill., 1980);
161. David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860-1915 (Urbana, Ill., 1976);
162. Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1987);
163. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York, 1983);
164. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family From Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985), 152-95;
165. Kenneth Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1976);
166. William Joe Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945 (Urbana, Ill., 1985);
167. Trotter, ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class and Gender (Bloomington, Ind., 1991);
168. Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1880-1920 (Chicago, 1967);
169. Carole Marks, We're Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington, Ind., 1989);
170. Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America (New York, 1991);
171. Gretchen Lemke Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996);
172. Kimberley Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945 (Urbana, Ill., 1999);
173. Lillian S. Williams Strangers in the Land of Paradise: The Creation of an African American Community, Buffalo, New York, 1900-1940 (Bloomington, Ind., 1999);
174. Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910-1963 (Berkeley, Calif., 2000);
175. Milton Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham, N.C., 1997);
176. Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant With Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York, 2000).
177. Most African-American women secured work in domestic service. On this point, see Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, "'This Work Had a End': African-American Domestic Workers in Washington, D.C., 1910-1940," in Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton, eds., "To Toil the Livelong Day": America's Women at Work, 1780-1980 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987)
178. Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1900-1940 (Washington D.C., 1994);
179. Sharon Harley, "For the Good of the Race: Gender, Work, and Domestic Roles in the Black Community, 1880-1930," Signs 15 (Winter 1990): 336-49;
180. Mary Romero, Made in the USA (New York, 1992);
181. Bonnie Thornton Dill, Across the Boundaries of Race and Class: An Exploration of Work and Family Among Black Female Domestic Servants (New York, 1994).
182. New York Times, March 29, 1917.
183. The pictorial logo juxtaposing "the undeveloped" with "the developed" adorned pledge cards of the Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in HOIS. Information on public events such as concerts and fairs may be found in flyers announcing programs on November 19 (no year); April 27, 1913; the Yule-Tide Bazaar on December 15-19, 1913; Spring Bazaar on April 22-25, 1913; see also Mary Gordon to Wood, February 23, 1915, and The New York Age, January 6, 1916, all in HOIS. Although the official sectional identity of the Howard orphan took on a rural, southern cast, census records present a more complicated picture. They do suggest that the proportion of children born in New York dropped by over half between 1880 and 1910. Yet, the greatest change in this thirty-year period consisted in a twenty-fold increase in the percentage of those whose birthplaces were unknown. These figures indicate the possibility that the ratio of children admitted voluntarily by living parents to those entering the institution by judicial commitment may have gone down with the passage of time, especially after the orphanage passed from the exclusive control of black women in 1902. There is little evidence on the circumstances under which children entered the institution in the nineteenth century. We have more information for the twentieth century. The HOIS's 1912 report to the State Board of Charities reveals that of the 234 children (132 boys and 102 girls) remaining on September 30, 1912, the largest number (114) were dispatched by poor law officials, while the second largest group (72) entered under judicial commitment for "improper guardianship" and 16 for destitution. Relatively few (32) were admitted by parents or guardians themselves. Thirty were listed as orphans, 95 as half-orphans (that is, those with one parent each), 51 had both parents living, while the parentage of 58 was unknown. This information may be found in the Summary and Verification of Schedule D. of the Homes For Children Report filled out by the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School for the New York State Board of Charities, 1912, HOIS. Demographic figures for the year 1914 suggest that nearly half of the inmates were between the ages of five and eleven (122 out of 248) and the largest number hailed from New York City (116 out of 224). See Report of General Inspection of HOIS by State Board of Charities, September 1914, HOIS, 4-5. (Hereafter State Inspection Report). While a majority of parents who committed their children to Howard undoubtedly did so for economic reasons, others sought the institution's help to discipline and educate their charges, and on occasion to provide them with male role models. One single mother, prompted by concern for her fatherless son's future, was prepared to not only suffer the emotional trauma of sending her son away to school but to make what would clearly have amounted to a substantial financial commitment as well. Her letter suggests the wrenching sense of loss that some mothers experienced at the prospect of parting with their offspring. She wrote the orphanage that she had been trying "for months" to admit her only son to a "suitable training school." She described the child as "silly and childish" as he had "never known a father" and went on to acknowledge, "it will almost break my heart to part with him but I loves him [sic] and want him to become a real man, so I have to leave myself out for a while and think of his future when I will be no more." Nor was she expecting to abdicate her financial responsibility for her son's upbringing to the school: "last but greatest I'll like to know how much you charges [sic], and whether it is paid in advance, monthly or weekly" (see A. G. to Wood, September 10, 1920, HOIS). A few guardians saw the orphanage as a potential adoption agency to help ensure a brighter future for their children than they were able to provide. One woman, forced by her husband's sudden death to enter domestic service, placed her mother in a home for the aged and sought Howard's aid in "get(ting) my two little girls into a good home" (see G. B. to the Superintendent, November 21, 1913; and J. H. to Wood, January 29, 1914, both in HOIS). Another woman wished to admit her twelve-year-old niece whom she described as "inclined to disobey and very obstinate"(see A. F. R. to Wood, October 5, 1918, HOIS). One Howard child was born in British Antigua out of wedlock to a destitute black mother and a white father who refused to provide for the child "owing to it being colored." She found her way to King's Park through the intercession of her mother's network of friends, which extended to New York City as well as the Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (see Thomas F. Moore, Assistant Superintendent, New York SPCC to Wood, June 4, 1914, HOIS).
184. Report of the Superintendent to the Board of Managers, April 23, 1914, HOIS.
185. Snevily to Wood, December 29, 1913, HOIS.
186. Wood to Eversley Childs, March 31 and May 10, 1917, HOIS.
187. Review, 17; City Inspection Report, 1917, 50, "Workers' Facts," all in HOIS. Mary Gordon and both her parents were born in Pennsylvania. James Gordon hailed from Virginia. Their demographic details are available in the Thirteenth Census of the United States (1910) for the Borough of Brooklyn.
188. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 185-229.
189. Gordon to Wood, October 16, 1914, HOIS. Howard's promotional literature stressed the centrality of propriety in the children's training. The institution tried to avoid placing its young women in families with young men because as Gordon's husband and predecessor explained, "the Negro girl is exposed to all kinds of indignities and frequently destroyed by her employer" (see James Gordon to Reverend Olin B. Coit, May 7, 1912, HOIS).
190. Gordon to Wood, September 26, 1914, HOIS.
191. The orphanage's pre-1913 constitution and by-laws had conferred sweeping powers on the superintendent. Article 7 of that document gave the superintendent under "the advice and direction of the several standing committees," "full direction and control of the asylum" including the power to appoint staff, edit the annual report, and keep all books and records "required by law or the Board of Managers and Trustees." Snevily urged that the superintendent's duties "be changed in such a way that [he] shall perform such duties as he may be instructed in ... by the Board of Managers ... That he shall have no power to purchase or sell property of the Society" without the direction of a relevant standing committee. "That he may employ such persons only as may be authorized by the Board of Managers" (Snevily to Wood, April 2, 1913). See also "Suggestions, Change, By-Laws, etc., March 31, 1913," typed manuscript, HOIS. Mary Gordon smarted at the Board's appropriation of her authority to hire and fire orphanage, staff: "I would much prefer engaging the bookkeeper and other employees simply upon the authority of superintendent ... since they are to be directed by me and under my supervision, they must feel they are amenable to me and that I have power to employ and discharge, otherwise my authority is weakened ... I will add that I feel perfectly competent to judge the competency of help I may have to have" (Gordon to Wood, April 2, 1914, HOIS). She dismissed a custodian for what she deemed promiscuous behavior but reinstated him at the request of his fiancée, a teacher at the institution. She explained her action to Wood thus: "I think the main thing Mr. Taylor (the custodian) had to learn was that I am not a figurehead here - Miss Campbell (the teacher) said in talking to me last Monday, 'Oh! Mrs. Gordon, Mr. Taylor did not understand you had such authority ..., he thought ... you can't discharge him, he is Mr. Snevily's man.'" Thus, Gordon added, her action had demonstrated that employees could not flout institutional standards in disregard of her authority (Gordon to Wood, October 16, 1914, HOIS).
192. City Inspection Report, 1917, 10-48;
193. State Inspection Report, 1914, both in HOIS.
194. City Inspection Report, 1917, 40-41, 48, 54, HOIS.
195. City Inspection Report, 1917, 10, HOIS.
196. See, for instance, Rudolph R. Reeder, How Two Hundred Children Live and Learn (New York, 1909);
197. Brown and McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us;
198. Friedman, These are Our Children;
199. W.J. Doherty, A Study of the Results of Institutional Care (New York, 1915);
200. L. Ashby, Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children, 1890-1917 (Philadelphia, 1984).
201. City Inspection Report, 1917, 48, 50-51, HOIS.
202. Washington to Wood, November 18, 1913, HOIS. Washington's words were especially high praise coming from a man who disapproved of orphanages, as is quite evident from his remarks before the 1909 White House conference on dependent children. Of course such disapproval must be evaluated in the context of Washington's view that black dependence was a peculiar pathology of migration to the urban North. He urged whites to help African Americans remain in their southern homes.
203. State Inspection Report, January 1916, 22 and December 1916, 25, both in HOIS.
204. Thomas Marshall's real initials were W.C. His case may be pieced together from the following pieces of correspondence: Amos Peaslee to Wood, May 1, 1915: George E. Stevens to Wood, May 13 and June 30, 1915; Wood to George E. Stevens, May 22, 1915; Wood to Gordon, May 25, 1915; Gordon to Wood, May 28 and June 3, 1915; Wood to Thomas J. Cuff, Assistant U.S. Attorney General, Brooklyn, February 7, 1916; Wood to W.C., March 10, 1917; W.C. to Wood, July 13 and October 17, 1915, and April 1, 1917; Wood to W.G. Nealy, April 4, 1917, all in HOIS. On the child savers' reservations about institutions, see Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 118.
205. On reformers' views on orphanages, see "Letter to the President of the United States Embodying the Conclusions of the Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 1909," reprinted in Robert Bremner, Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 2: 365.
206. For instance, as Friedman has reported, as early as 1869, a New York Times observer commented on "homelike" character of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum when compared with other orphanages. See Friedman, These are Our Children, 51. Bogen suggests the following reasons for the superiority of Jewish institutions over their Gentile counterparts: they were built later and thus benefited from the mistakes of those who had gone before them; and they were often better funded because they enjoyed the united support of their communities.
207. See Bogen, Luckiest Orphans, 170.
208. Friedman, These are Our Children, 43, 38.
209. Friedman, These are Our Children, 71-72
210. Bogen, Luckiest Orphans, 161-62.
211. Goldstein, House on Gorham Street, 128.
212. Brown and McKeown, Poor Belong to Us, 100-101.
213. The literature on the African-American family in slavery and freedom is rich and voluminous. On the adaptation of the African tradition of consanguineal families to New World exigencies see Christine Farnham, "Sapphire? The Issue of Dominance in the Slave Family, 1830-1865," in Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton, eds., "To Toil the Livelong Day", 68-83.
214. On the slave family see also John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972);
215. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974);
216. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York, 1976);
217. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow;
218. Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman;
219. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988);
220. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom. The inmate case histories of the nation's first juvenile reformatory, the New York House of Refuge, are filled with examples of extended surrogate families among African Americans in nineteenth-century New York.
221. See Gunja SenGupta, "Black and 'Dangerous'? African-American Working Poor Perspectives on Juvenile Reform and Welfare in Victorian New York, 1840-1890," Journal of Negro History LXXXVI (Spring 2001): 99-131.
222. State Inspection Report, 1915, 26, 28-29; Gordon to Wood, December 14, 1915; Superintendent's Report to the Board of Managers, March 1915, 2; flyers advertising Easter Bazaar, March 22-26, 1915, Yuletide Bazaar, December 15-19, 1913, and Spring Bazaar, April 22-25, 1913, all in HOIS.
223. City Inspection Report, 1917, 60;
224. State Inspection Report, 1915, 23-24, HOIS.
225. City Inspection Report, 1917, 1-8 HOIS.
226. For recent examples of work on social inequalities within the black community, see essays by Elizabeth Dale, Beth Tompkins Bates, and Kevin Gaines in AHA Forum, American Historical Review 102 (April 1997): 311-387.
227. Wood to Gordon, July 30, 1915 and August 5, 1915; Gordon to Wood, August 4, 1915, HOIS. Italics in second quote are mine. Color and gender differences also contributed to intra-black hierarchies, especially under the watch of J. H. N. Waring, who succeeded Gordon in 1917. Waring was a "nearly white" medical doctor educated at Howard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, and Hampton Institute, had served as a school principal in Baltimore, and sat on Howard University's Board of Trustees. Ann Smith, an aspiring Howard instructor and graduate of Washington University, Seattle, alleged that Waring, upon seeing that she was "rather dark - He and his family and the other teachers [were] nearly white ... at once told her she could not teach - but must be housemother and cook, etc., for 30 boys." Ironically enough, Smith fought her private battle against the tyranny of whiteness perpetrated by a member of her own "race" by appealing to liberal white patrons to find her a teaching position elsewhere (see George W. Andrews to William Pickens, September 15, 1917, HOIS). It is possible that gender in addition to color shaped Waring's situational dominance through the "othering" of Smith. Interestingly enough, the home's promotional literature dating to the post-Gordon era reflected a shift in attitude toward the sexual division of labor among Howard staff that was apparently linked to an attempt to organize cottage life on the farm within the framework of a heterosexual two-parent model of family life. A printed sheet of information on the home entitled "Workers' Facts" circulated among patrons during the Waring administration declared that each cottage at King's Park was placed in charge of "a teacher and his wife" - a departure from the Gordon era reign of single cottage mothers and predominantly female teachers. Contrast the "Workers' Facts" with the profile of the employees including teachers in typed ms. entitled "Employees of the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School," March 24, 1913. This list (compiled while Gordon was still matron), suggests that the institution's employees were predominantly women (including all its teachers, clerk, and agent). The State Inspection Report of 1915 listed the teachers as follows: Mrs. F. A. Taylor, graduate of Teacher's Training School at Cheney, Pa.; Miss W. Smith, graduate of Public School #2 of Washington D.C.; Miss H. Sturgis, graduate of Training School at Collingswood, N.J.; Miss G. Frank, graduate of Fisk University, Nashville; Miss V. Saunders, graduate of kindergarten course of Boston Normal School; Miss E. Adair, graduate of Normal College at Danbury, Conn.; and Miss C. Berguin, enrollee in a summer school for teachers at Columbia University, New York. It seems likely that the principal listed in this report, A. W. Reason, a graduate of Oberlin Academy and Howard University, was male. In her November 1915 report to the managers, however, Gordon identified the principal as Miss Francis Gunner of Howard University. See Superintendent's Annual Report to the Society of the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School, November 1915, 1, HOIS.
228. On the background of Howard's teachers, see Superintendent's Report to the Board of Managers For the Year Ending October 31, 1914, 2-3; and State Inspection Report, 1915, 22-23, both in HOIS.
229. Typewritten pantomime scripts, no date, HOIS. The scripts are untitled, simply labeled "Scenario I," "Scenario II," and so forth.
230. Hale, Making Whiteness, 228, 229.
231. In this context, it is important to note that the Waring era proved very brief. The State Commissioner of Charities closed down the institution in 1918. Thus, Gordon had a far more enduring influence than Waring on the young lives she touched. See Wood to Chester A. Allen, Vice-President, King's County Trust Company, May 13, 1947, HOIS; Mabee, "Charity in Travail," 74-75.
232. L. to Gordon, October 3, 1913, HOIS.
233. See note #64 for the prominent presence of women among the orphanage's staff during the Gordon era.
234. R. C. D. to Gordon, n.d., HOIS.
235. R. to Gordon, June 23, 1913, HOIS.
236. Mary Jackson's real initials were W. H. See W. H. to Wood, October 1919, HOIS. On African-American women in the professions, see Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 (Bloomington, Ind., 1989);
237. Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago, 1996);
238. Gloria Moldow, Women Doctors in Gilded Age Washington: Gender, Race, and Professionalization (Urbana, Ill., 1987).
239. Mrs. John Meitar to Waring, n.d., HOIS.
240. See chapter three in Peiss, Cheap Amusements.
241. Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York, 1985), 15, 25-26.
242. Hale, Making Whiteness, 121-197.
243. Florence Caruthers to Ms. Marks, August 7, 1917, HOIS. Fannie Moore is a pseudonym for E.
244. M. J. to Wood, April 28, 1918. The HOIS launched a conference on the movement to increase food supply during the war and apparently conceived of a plan "whereby each child will have a garden of his own, in order to learn practical truck gardening" (unidentified newsclipping; Wood to Francis L. Holmes, April 11, 1917, both in HOIS). In response to reports "emanating from the South that Germans were plotting Negro insurrection," Wood declared that African Americans were "a splendid example of devotion to a country which has done them both good and ill" (The New York Evening Post, April 5, 1917).
245. Mrs. C. M. Williamson to Mrs. Marks, May 6, 1917. Juliet is a pseudonym for E. See also entries in lined notebook containing information on children "placed out," such as that for R. B. dated November 27, 1916. Examples of works that explore the image and role of consumption as an instrument of assimilation include Jenna Weissmann Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950 (New York, 1994),
246. Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (Minneapolis, Minn., 1992).
247. On attempts to regulate working class adolescent female sexuality, see Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995);
248. Ruth Alexander, The "Girl Problem": Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995).
249. G. O. to Waring, May 9, 1918; G. O. to Wood, May 17, 1918, HOIS.
250. My italics. W. H. to Wood, November 23, 1919, HOIS.
251. Dorothy Benedict's real initials were F. G. See F. G. to Wood, May 8 and May 20, 1918. See also E. R. to Wood, July 23, 1920 and A. S. to Wood, n.d., HOIS.
252. Carter's real initials were F. M., and Fuccillo's F. B. See Bertha Blackman to Wood, September 3, 6, November 1, 5 and December 18, 1918; January 7 and March 25, 1919; Wood to Arthur W. Towne, November 4, 1918; Wood to Elizabeth Lawrence, November 4, 1918; Wood to W. B. Codling, November 6, 1918; Nathan O. Petty to Wood, November 23, 1918; Wood to Petty, December 2, 1918; Towne to Wood, December 17, 1918; Wood to Towne, December 18, 1918; Benjamin Blackman to Wood, November 1, 1918; Wood to Bertha Blackman, March 31, November 11, December 18, 1918, Ibid. On the "girl problem," see Alexander, The "Girl Problem."
253. When the institution closed, the mortgage on the King's Park property was foreclosed, and the children were distributed among various asylums, the majority being sent to the New York Colored Orphan Asylum at Riverdale. Thereafter the trustees of the school devoted all donations to the higher education of young African Americans from Brooklyn. On the demise of the HOIS, see Mabee, "Charity in Travail," 74-75. On black self-help as a casualty of social welfare professionalism, see O'Donnell, "The Care of Dependent African-American Children in Chicago."