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THE RIGHTS OF THE DEFENSELESS
Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America
By SUSAN J. PEARSON
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-65201-6
Chapter One
"The Child Is an Animal": Domesticity, Discipline, and the Logic of Joint Protection
Almost as soon as little Mary Ellen Wilson's case had been resolved, her rescuers founded a separate entity, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NY-SPCC). Immediately following the formation of the New York SPCC, reformers organized SPCCs in Brooklyn, Buffalo, Baltimore, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Wilmington, Delaware. Though Mary Ellen's case proved to be the impetus for a new form of organized child protection activity, the decision of Henry Bergh and Elbridge Gerry to separate the protection of animals and children ultimately proved to be atypical. As child protection spread outward from New York City, most existing and subsequent anticruelty societies combined child with animal protection under one institutional mantle. Most often, these "dual" organizations were known by the name of "humane society."
Anticruelty reformers rarely felt the need to discuss, or justify, their decision to combine child with animal protection. On the rare occasions when they did reflect on this choice, reformers usually averred that combining the two functions was a practical rather than an ideological matter. But the reality was much more complicated. In fact, combining child with animal protection was in many ways a profoundly impractical choice: protecting animals and protecting children turned out to involve very different sets of problems and priorities. Far from being simply expedient, the institutional fusion of animals with children was dictated as much by a cultural as a practical logic.
Popular and humanitarian literature identified children and animals as similar, capable of forming intense emotional bonds and reciprocal relations, and incorporated animals-as-pets into the emotional order of domesticity. In addition, popular authors and humanitarians applied new ideas about punishment, discipline, and rearing equally to animals and children, incorporating both within a disciplinary regime of kindness. Associated with middle-class domestic ideals, the regime of kindness consigned both beasts and babes to a similar position in the household's affective economy, assigning them a mutual role as objects of sentimental investment. The sentimentalization of both children and animals was, in turn, critical to the increased moral attention given to both over the course of the nineteenth century. For within a philosophy that regarded familial feelings as the exemplar of all morality, membership in the family was equivalent to membership in humanity at large, a necessary precondition for the extension of rights within the framework of sentimental liberalism.
First among the so-called dual societies for animal and child protection to emerge in the wake of Mary Ellen's case was the Illinois Humane Society, founded in Chicago in 1869 as the Illinois SPCA. In 1877, the society's board decided to incorporate child protection under its mantle. To reflect its new functions the organization changed its name to the Illinois Humane Society (IHS). From his perch as the president of the national American Humane Association, former IHS president Edwin Lee Brown promoted the moniker "humane society" as the appropriate label for all organizations that combined animal and child protection. The name was meant to suggest that animal and child protection were joined by principle rather than accident or convenience. Twenty years after this titular change, IHS president John Shortall concluded that the decision to join the two functions had "been amply justified ... by the fact—as I believe it to be—that no Society for the prevention of cruelty to animals—perhaps none for the prevention of cruelty to children—has been organized since that date." That is, no single-function society had been formed since 1877, but instead "the title 'Humane Society' has been commonly adopted, and both services united thereunder." Likewise, when the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) began to oppose cruelty through its National Department of Mercy in 1890, it gathered both animals and children under its protective mantle. In some states animals and children were even linked as government wards. In Colorado, for example, the state's twenty-year-old humane society became an arm of the government in 1901, and was renamed the State Bureau of Child and Animal Protection. From this platform, Colorado's Humane Society and WCTU activists (unsuccessfully) petitioned Congress for "the creation of a Federal Government Board, whose duty it shall be to study the conditions of, and suggest methods for the protection of children and dumb animals."
Anticruelty activists seldom devoted much effort to explaining the decision to combine animal and child protection functions. Sometimes, however, reformers explained that animals and children were joined by their common helplessness. More to the point, reformers pictured animals' and children's helplessness as grounded in a single, common source: their speechlessness. Most humane societies adopted the SPCA's motto, "We speak for those who cannot speak for themselves." This emphasis on animals' inability to speak was clearly borrowed from antebellum abolitionists, who described themselves acting as "mouth and utterance" for the enslaved and asserted that "we open our mouth for the dumb and plead for our brethren who cannot plead for themselves." Though abolitionists claimed that slaves could not speak for themselves, they often specified that slaves were dumb because of social, not natural, conditions. The Lynn, Massachusetts, Women's Anti-Slavery Society, for example, praised Frederick Douglass's ability to "plead for those, who, by American laws, cannot plead for themselves." Slaves were forbidden from making legal testimony against whites, and this rule served abolitionists as a metaphor for their larger condition. The difference between speech and silence was, abolitionists imagined, the difference between freedom and slavery; voicelessness was powerlessness.
For animal and child protectionists too the trope of speechlessness stood in for the inability to act physically, legally, and politically on one's own behalf. Reformers continually emphasized that "small animals, small children, young lives—they are all the same as far as the need of protection and gentleness is concerned." Of children, New York SPCC president Elbridge Gerry wrote that their "very innocence and helplessness present a cogent plea from which few can turn away." Though not literally mute, children were represented in anticruelty literature as without "the power of speech to make known their injuries," and like animals, without a voice because their "appeals for mercy and protection are unheeded" or because they are "afraid to complain and seek protection and help." Creating analogies between the situation of animals and that of children, most humanitarians agreed with Henry Bergh when he declared that "I regard a helpless child in the same light as the dumb animal. Both are God's creatures. Neither can protect themselves."
Though Bergh and other anticruelty reformers sometimes explained the relationship between animal and child protection in terms of common helplessness, more often they rested their case on practical grounds: as in the case of Mary Ellen Wilson, citizens brought established SPCAs complaints of cruelty to children, and since there was no one else willing to investigate, they did it themselves. Indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that Etta Wheeler's impulse to bring a child-cruelty case to an animal protection organization was not singular. From its very earliest days, the Pennsylvania SPCA received complaints of cruelty to children and the Massachusetts SPCA likewise had to publicly remind its supporters that it did not prosecute cruelty to human beings. In spite of such disavowals, in 1876 the MSPCA did intervene in a case involving overworked child acrobats. Likewise, the Illinois Humane Society did not seek child- protective functions but took them because, as IHS board member Mrs. C. M. Fairchild recalled, "the abuse of children, as beings likewise with animals not able to speak for or defend themselves, was brought to the attention of the Society." Whether reformers wanted to address cruelty to children or not, they were often forced to confront its existence by a public that saw animal and child protection as logical corollaries.
This public demand was not without its merits. Animal protection societies were equipped to intervene in cases of child cruelty and neglect in ways that most existing charities were not. As the New York SPCC's first president, John D. Wright, explained, many charities already existed to aid children, but they "assume the care and control of their inmates ONLY AFTER THEY ARE LEGALLY PLACED IN THEIR CUSTODY." An agency modeled after the SPCA would, by contrast, actually ferret out cases of cruelty and, when necessary, remove children from the custody of their parents. Already granted police powers by their state charters, and already engaged in the business of receiving complaints, sending officers into the field to investigate, collect evidence, and bring the results before local magistrates, some SPCAs saw child protection as simply a matter of applying the same methods to different objects. In combining moral suasion with law enforcement, the SPCAs had created a unique organization that promised to pick up the slack left by city police departments. "The laws already exist for the protection of children and animals," explained the superintendent of the Wisconsin Humane Society, "but the police force is necessarily occupied with the gravest and most obvious cases of crime. Before the organization of this Society, no friendly and powerful hand had been especially delegated to rescue these children and animals from lives of misery and abuse, and to bring them, by an order of court, under the merciful care of humane people." To some members of the general public, and to some anticruelty reformers, extending animal protection services to children made sense from a procedural standpoint: anticruelty organizations were specially empowered by the law in ways that could benefit children as well as animals, and the casework method developed in animal protection could be easily transferred to children as well.
There were, then, some practical reasons to join animal and child protection. On the surface, cruelty toward animals and children appeared the same—so too did the methods for alleviating it. But many humane societies experienced the merger as profoundly impractical. For one thing, anticruelty organizations found it difficult to divide attention and time between animals and children. In 1880, just three years after it had begun child as well as animal protection, the Illinois Humane Society assured its supporters that although the child cruelty caseload was increasing apace, "all cases of cruelty, whether toward children and animals, are carefully investigated and dealt with." In spite of this assurance, anxiety about the society's ability to adequately perform both functions proved persistent. As President Shortall himself acknowledged during an 1897 speech, the decision to incorporate child protection within an existing SPCA was arrived at with some difficulty. Some of the organization's members feared "that with a horse and a child at the same time calling for help, the horse would be likely to suffer, at least by delay." With limited staffing, money, finite time, and two different populations to serve and protect, how could humane societies avoid giving priority to either animals or children? How could the two functions complement rather than compete with one another?
The right balance proved hard to achieve. Some evidence suggests that, at least in the case of the IHS, animal and child protection did not easily fit together. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, IHS leaders considered breaking out child-saving functions into a separate organization. Just two years after joining animal and child protection, Shortall expressed anxiety at the 1879 annual meeting that, when faced with a choice between remedying cruelty to an animal or a child, "where one of these must be postponed, it will be that of cruelty to the brute." The next year, Shortall again used his annual presidential address to argue for "the necessity of the organization of a branch of this Society which shall assume exclusively the protection of children from cruelty" since their "overworked city agent" could not handle all the complaints that came his way. That year, Shortall appointed and headed a special committee to investigate the formation of a separate SPCC. However, by the next year's meeting Shortall had relented. His special committee reported that child protection "thus far has not lessened nor impaired the efficiency of our animal protection service." Further, the committee asserted that child protection "seems at present naturally and legitimately to belong to the work of the Humane Society" since no other state or local organization was prepared to absorb it. "Without our seeking it," they went on, "the work has come to us, we are doing it, and the public sentiment demands that we continue to do so." They resolved, therefore, simply to seek additional funds from the public to enhance their ability to "prosecute this work of protecting children (as well as animals) from cruelty, abuse and criminal neglect." By 1884, doubt about the appropriate merger of animal and child protection had officially been abandoned. At that year's annual meeting, one of the society's founding directors and the author of the state's anticruelty legislation, John C. Dore, proclaimed that "prevention of cruelty to children and to dumb beasts, are part and parcel of the same work, and it is very fortunate that we never separated the two as I think was once considered." Like the members of the general public who brought children's cases to animal protection organizations, Dore believed that animal and child protection were naturally aligned.
Though Shortall realized that it was not possible for the IHS to disaggregate into two separate societies, he did not, in the end, agree with Dore. Instead, after raising the issue of competition between animal and child cases, Shortall proposed a way out of the conundrum: the two caseloads could safely be combined precisely because they had so little in common. "There has been no collision of interests" between animal and child protection, Shortall somewhat disingenuously reported in 1897, because "the action of the Society in the separate fields is too dissimilar in process"—the children's cases being more complicated and requiring more lengthy involvement than those of animals. Shortall's claim was echoed by William DeLoss Love, the president of the Connecticut Humane Society. Love also found that animal and child protection presented quite different problems. "The dual aim of a humane society, as an organization for the protection of both children and animals, inevitably leads to the study of diverse problems," he wrote. "The two conditions seem to have nothing in common except their helplessness." As with Shortall, Love concluded that children's cases were more complex and protracted. Yet the Connecticut Humane Society, like the IHS, was not prepared to abandon either species among its charges.
Shortall and Love were right—the problems of animals were very different than the problems of children. Internal reports from the IHS's own officers illustrate the "diverse" problems facing those who would protect both animals and children. In an October 8, 1884, report to President Shortall, IHS agent O. L. Dudley described how he had spent his day. In the morning, Dudley had inspected a horse market and investigated a complaint about a whipped horse. Finding no witnesses to the whipping, Dudley returned to the office. While there, "a lady brought in a little girl 8 years of age." The girl, it turned out, was the sister of two other girls that Dudley had, the week prior, placed in Chicago's Home for the Friendless orphan asylum. All three girls, Dudley reported, were "driven away from home by a drunken step mother." After taking the third sister to the home, "[I] went and hunted up the father and brought him to the office and he signed surrenders giving all three of these girls to the Home for the Friendless." Tracking commerce in and cruelty to horses in the morning, Dudley spent his afternoon presiding over the dissolution of a family. The problem facing the dual society was not simply, as some IHS members had feared, that either animals or children might be favored, but rather the disparate caseload facing officers such as Dudley.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE RIGHTS OF THE DEFENSELESS by SUSAN J. PEARSON Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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