Surviving the Great Depression: orphanages and orphans in Cleveland.

At the 1930 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, Homer Folks, a long-time critic of orphanages, reported that 220,000 needy children remained in “their own homes,” thanks to state mothers’ pensions; these allowed women to care for their children at home rather than place them in orphanages. At long last, Folks hoped, professional social workers were able to implement the “fundamental principles of social work” articulated at the 1909 White House Conference on Dependent Children: most significantly, “home life is the highest and finest product of civilization. . . . Except in unusual circumstances, the home should not be broken up for reasons of poverty.” But the nation had already descended into the Great Depression, an “unusual circumstance” that devastated families and moved thousands of children into foster homes and orphanages. Cleveland orphanages, on the brink of redefining their mission and clientele, postponed change and maintained their historic role as significant caretakers of the children of the urban poor. This local study confirms the crucial role that orphanages played at the national level during the Depression. In December 1933, 102,000 dependent and neglected children in the United States were in foster homes, and a record number were in orphanages—more than 140,000. According to Marshall B. Jones, “orphanages threw every resource they had into the breach. . . . Had it not been for the [orphanages], there might have been twice as many homeless children on the streets as there were.” In 1933, Lawrence C. Cole, executive director of the Cleveland Children’s Bureau, the city’s largest private child placement agency, described a child-care system under siege but steadfast in its mission: “The third year of the depression, with its continued strain upon the resources, not only of the families themselves but of the social agencies, has continued to bring many difficulties for the children’s field.” The number of dependent children continued to climb. Although most were placed in foster homes, orphanages remained crowded with children who had nowhere else to go: “Children cannot be discharged as formerly to their own homes or relatives as families under present conditions are unable to reestablish themselves, or