“Uplifting the ‘Dangerous Classes’”  

“Uplifting the ‘Dangerous Classes,’” by Howard Husock, winter, 2008,
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_urb-brace.html  .  An excerpt:

Homelessness, contrary to those who date its inception to the Reagan administration, is nothing new in New York . In June 1872, between 20,000 and 30,000 homeless and vagrant children haunted the city, sleeping not on their grandmothers’ couches—as homelessness is sometimes defined, as a legal matter, today—but actually on the streets. ...

…Charles Loring Brace …  “The vast immigration of poor foreign peasants and laborers [and] the neglect of the marriage-tie and consequent breaking up of family life, with a certain independence allowed to youth . . . for these and other causes, there has come to be in the United States . . . a growth of a poor, vagrant and criminal class of children, scarcely ever known before in the civilized world.” ...

Brace’s greatest accomplishment in New York was a privately financed system of shelters and schools that helped tens of thousands of homeless kids a year—at a time when the city’s population was under 1 million. His life is a reminder that the assimilation of poor immigrants and the uplift of the American poor in the late nineteenth century were not inevitable but rather the results of concerted action by committed people. He deserves to be better remembered—both for what he did and how he did it. ...  

Brace … encouraged “self-help.” He was, as Joel Schwartz observes in Fighting Poverty with Virtue, a moral reformer—a man who sought to mold boys into moral adults, people who, as they encountered novel situations, would naturally make the right choices because they held the right values. “The principal value of our Enterprise , we believe, as distinguished from similar efforts, is that our whole influence is moral and in no respect coercive,” Brace wrote. “Those who have much to do with alms-giving and plans of human improvement soon see how superficial and comparatively useless all assistance or organization is which does not touch habits of life and the inner forces which form character.” ...  

The contrast with organizations that help “at-risk” children today is striking. Typically, they promote a utilitarian worldview—“Don’t do something because it will hurt you”—as opposed to the core idea of right versus wrong. There is, for example, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or Dare, which hopes to scare younger kids from using drugs by bringing police officers to elementary school classrooms nationwide. ...

If you answer the multiple-choice questions below and e-mail to lessonanswers@mymontebello.com with “Lesson answers” in the subject field, you will be credited toward a “certificate of recognition in community affairs” to be awarded in 2007 by a local nonprofit organization. 

1. What is the history of homelessness and children in the United States ?

(a) Our problem began with the liberalization of the law on marriage.

(b) There was a very large number of homeless children in New York City one hundred thirty-five years ago.  

2. Who was Charles Loring Brace?

(a) He tried to build the character of homeless children, so that they would make moral decisions.

(b) He was an American version of the old man who led the boy bandits in Oliver Twist.  

3. What is the author of this article attempting to convey?

(a) That Brace’s philosophy is no longer applicable because times have changed.

(b) That Brace’s philosophy contrasts with that of modern programs to help at-risk children.

April 17, 2008