Small Savings on the Backs of Foster Children

Small Savings on the Backs of Foster Children - NYTimes.com:

In 1853, Charles Loring Brace, a patrician reformer, devised a plan to remediate the circumstances of New York City’s 30,000 homeless children, many of whom passed their days as desperate salesmen hawking rags and newspapers, and who had acquired the label, absent a world of ethnic sensitivities, of “street Arabs.” Founding theChildren’s Aid Society, Brace controversially arranged for abandoned children to be sent, by rail, to farm families — “kind, Christian homes in the country” as he put it, typically where they would work. By 1929, approximately 100,000 city children had been relocated across the country, often with no sense of where they would be going, in what became known as the Orphan Train movement and was the precursor to the American foster care system.

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