Two Cheers for Orphanages

Abstract

Orphanages are much in the news today. In May 1994, soon-to-be House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich touched off a national uproar when he proposed denying welfare payments to unwed mothers under the age of twenty-one and placing the children they were unable to support in orphanages. Congressional Democrats denounced Gingrich's proposal as callous and wrongheaded; Hillary Rodham Clinton declared the idea unbelievable and absurd.' Gingrich invited the first lady to visit Blockbuster Video and rent the 1938 movie Boys Town, which depicts an idealized vision of orphanages.2 Clinton advisor George Stephanopolous countered by promising to send Republicans a copy of Oliver Twist.3 The historical record has long favored the Democrats. Orphanages' unsavory reputation first surfaced during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Both Gilded Age and Progressive-era child-welfare reformers denounced them as jail-like, overcrowded, unsanitary institutions that both killed infants and warped children's moral development.4 The deinstitutionalization movement of the mid-1960s, directed primarily at residential treatment centers, revived the earlier animosity toward institutions.5 In the following two decades, the new social historians reinforced the negative image of orphanages by interpreting the motives of officials and policymakers and the function of social welfare institutions in terms of social control and