Conditions before Reform

The Midwest became a major region for child placement because of its small family farms and diverse institutional makeup. In addition to its own dependent children, the Midwest also accepted tens of thousands of dependent children from outside the region, which exacerbated the challenges of supervision.Footnote ⁷ Midwestern states such as Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio all created slightly different methods for the placement and oversight of dependent children, but all relied on farmers to provide most of the homes. Many farmers who accepted children without payment did so because the children provided affordable labor. Prior to the 1890s, the agency or institution responsible for placing dependent children took responsibility for their supervision. In practice this meant that some children received supervision, and some did not. Haphazard methods of supervision and a lack of comprehensive recordkeeping caught the attention of reformers, who sought uniformity and enhanced control.

Placing children in the homes of farmers represented a consistent desire to impart dependents with appropriate work ethics and skills. During the colonial period, able-bodied, dependent adults and children worked for their care, and the emphasis on “self-help” continued throughout the nineteenth century. Placing out dependent children with farmers increased in popularity after the Civil War, as farmers sought affordable labor and as institutions for dependent children grew in number and capacity, which cost charities and governments hundreds of dollars per child annually.Footnote ⁸ The lack of supervision for placed-out children between 1870 and 1890 reflected in part the belief that farmers were good conduits of American values and therefore less inclined to overwork children in their care.Footnote ⁹

Although sometimes referred to as foster homes or boarding out by contemporaries and scholars alike, placement homes did not involve an exchange of money for care. Farm families became the most popular choice for free placements because many people believed that farm work was healthy and that the life skills taught on a farm could provide lasting self-sufficiency to dependents.Footnote ¹⁰ In the opinions of those who advocated placement, this arrangement in which no money was exchanged would also enable a dependent child to feel like a member of the placement family—an ad hoc adoption. However, farmers regularly returned children who could not or would not work, making the placement home temporary for many children.

The Michigan State Public School for Dependent Children (MSPS) in Coldwater provides an instructive example of how rural placement worked before 1890. When it opened in 1874 this state-funded facility became the first of its type in the nation. The legislature intended to provide a centralized location from which dependent children could be placed out into family homes. Unlike other midwestern states at the time, the state funded this institution. However, like most institutions that placed out children, the MSPS relied heavily on farmers. Between 1874 and 1890 the school placed out over 1,000 children but waited until 1885 to pay a professional visitor, whose job was to find placement families suitable for MSPS residents and to supervise children already in homes. Prior to this hiring, the superintendent checked on children by writing them letters. County volunteers helped supervise and place children in their spare time. This network of volunteers proved unreliable. While some clearly took the time to visit placed-out children and even recommended removals or replacements, others could not be bothered to perform the job with any regularity.Footnote ¹¹

Institutional employees understood that children would be working for and with the family in which they were placed. For many children placed on farms, work included plowing, animal care, garden tending, and the like—hard work but not out of step with other rural children. Many viewed farm labor as quaint and believed children “assigned to the little duties of incident to a country home life” would grow up to be useful Americans.Footnote ¹² However, some farmers took advantage of this “free” labor by overworking children placed with them. Some farmers denied children schooling or proper care and even returned them to an institution after a season of back-breaking labor.Footnote ¹³

The prevalence of this problem underscored the need for better supervision. Calls for improving this situation began in earnest during the 1880s. Essays in professional publications with titles such as “The Shady Side of Placing Out” skewered the lax supervision provided by institutions and agencies involved in placing. Overwork on farms commonly garnered the most complaints, with one placer remarking, “Our experience with farmers has not been satisfactory. They are not considerate for the child's welfare, caring only to use him for their profit.” Another commented, “It takes something more than a farm of a hundred and sixty acres and well-filled granaries to constitute a good home. There may be all of these, and yet the elements of a good home be entirely wanting.” Such complaints all echoed the sentiment that the biggest problem with farm placement was that “the average family [involved with the system] wants a child for what they can get out of it in the way of work.”Footnote ¹⁴

Part of the urgency of this call for better supervision reflected the growth of children's institutions during the last decades of the 1800s. Counties, private charities, states, and placement agencies all opened facilities in the Midwest and looked to its farmers for homes. For some institutions, placement alleviated the cost of housing dependent children.Footnote ¹⁵ Despite the lagging supervision of children placed on farms, calls still came to increase the practice for the good of the children. T.E. Ellison of the Indiana State Board of Charities lambasted the notion that any institutions could be better than placement homes: “To think that the people of an institution should be found in America to take the children of our poor … and claim to make better citizens of them than can be made in our homes is a thing that no person can imagine.”Footnote ¹⁶ So many reformers continued to laud the ideal of the humble rural home, that the farm retained its image as the savior of institutionalized children despite the admitted paucity of effective supervision of what actually took place in placement homes. Farm placement also saved the expense of social welfare programs; the cost of institutionalization bothered those who saw institutionalized children as taking advantage of the generosity of their community. One editorial in Indiana reflected this opinion: “Send those out who are fit to go to homes, keep the rest in until they are licked into shape.”Footnote ¹⁷ However, this opinion identified a major problem with farm placement: how could placers prevent dependent children from literally being “licked into shape” by their placement families?

Supervisory improvements could help diminish the likelihood of “servile dependence,” abuse, or seasonal employment while continuing to reduce the number of children living on the dole in an institution.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1892, approximately $40 million was invested in institutional care for dependent children in the United States. The number of institutions for children increased during the decade, indicating the popularity of institutions as a care option. Placement, however, could be arranged for an estimated flat fee of between $20 and $50 per child. Those footing the bill for childhood dependency wanted affordable care, and rural placement provided a seemingly good alternative, as long as supervision was upgraded.Footnote ¹⁹ At least for now, reformers believed that farmers simply needed to be better managed to ensure that children in their care did not serve as free hired hands. Placers needed to be held accountable for the children they were consigning to farm families.

Improvements in Supervision

Although not a watershed decade in provisions for dependent children, the 1890s saw marked improvements. Reformers had success in pushing improved supervisions, better screening of potential placement homes, and better record keeping. Galen A. Merrill, chairman of a Destitute and Neglected Children session at the 1900 National Conference of Charities and Corrections, noted, “The placing-out system has received such commendation … and the results accomplished where it has been best administered so strongly commend it, that, notwithstanding the abuses it may lead to when badly administered, it is considered, at its best, the best system.” Despite claims by some historians that free placement homes declined with the advent of progressive reforms, farm placement in the Midwest actually increased until World War I.Footnote ²⁰ That placement raced ahead of actual supervision is a testament to its popularity. The initial goal was not to dismantle the system but to institute change within it.

One of the earliest attempts at organized, state-sponsored supervision came in Ohio. In 1889 the state legislature authorized the employment of visiting agents for county children's homes, though the state did not require the county homes to fill the position. Without the requirement, most of these institutions failed to hire a supervisor of placed-out children.Footnote ²¹ Indiana attempted to mandate supervision in the form of County Boards of Children's Guardians, while Ohio formed Boards of County Visitors. These court-appointed groups were intended to supervise placed-out children in a more organized way, but counties implemented them unevenly. Indiana's urban counties used the boards for home visits of immigrant families before rural counties used them for placement visits. In Ohio, rural areas at first treated the boards as an inexpensive alternative to hiring visitors.Footnote ²² By 1900 in Michigan, where placement went through the MSPS, county volunteers assisted hired visitors in the supervision of 1,200 children annually.Footnote ²³ This hybrid system increased the number of visits performed and the number and quality of pre-placement screenings, causing Michigan's state agent to report that only forty-five of the 1,200 children theoretically under the institution's purview, could not be located.Footnote ²⁴

At this stage, reformers had some success in implementing better screening of potential caregivers through pre-placement inspection. Hitherto, some placements simply required a letter of reference, which prompted Mary Dykeman of the Cass County, Indiana Children's Home to note that anyone could round up one decent reference letter or “certificate of good moral character.”Footnote ²⁵ By urging home visits and inspections instead of relying on reference letters, reformers introduced a more intrusive system of supervision. Inspection visits required more detailed record keeping and brought government into the homes hosting placed-out children.

Michigan, because of its state institution, became the first midwestern state to use state-funded visitors for placed-out children. The MSPS increased its state visitation staff during the 1890s. Ohio and Indiana followed suit, at first pairing the preexisting network of county volunteers with state placing agents and visitors. Ohio's state visitors eventually supervised all placed-out children in the state, although they were often also responsible for the inspection of institutions.Footnote ²⁶ As these state officials took control over the supervision of placed-out children, institutions lost the ability to manage their own child placement services. For some, this proved a windfall because of the expense saved, but for institutions not interested in state oversight, the increasing centralization caused tension. Children's institutions operating on a per-child or per-diem basis worried that they would be put out of business by the state placement/visiting service, which would more efficiently remove children from the institution and thereby lessen its income. Not until 1911 would the state agent of Indiana, Amos W. Butler, note, “The opposition of a few institutions, at one time quite noticeable, has in all practical regard passed away.”Footnote ²⁷

Working with miserly budgets, social workers and other paid visiting agents nonetheless were expected to spend weeks in transit checking on children. Even so, many children received only a single visit annually, and children who removed themselves from a placement could be lost. Children who took matters into their own hands often did so as a response to poor care or with the intention of earning an income rather than laboring for free. Other children used the state inspection visit as an occasion to be removed from an unhappy placement. Re-placing children into new families took time away from supervision. With these challenges, or perhaps because of them, the number of state visitors hired in the Midwest increased during the Progressive Era. This reflected the large number of children out with farm families and the large number living in institutions still needing to be placed. It also indicated the amount of work associated with each child's care.Footnote ²⁸

There were multiple reasons for increased supervision at the state level. Even before the implementation of better inspection and record keeping, numerous reports circulated among officials and the public of overwork and physical and emotional neglect and abuse.Footnote ²⁹ Placed-out children often faced a destructive revolving door. Children went into a placement, endured a few months of poor treatment and onerous work, and then returned to an institution for a short stay before beginning the placement process again. After being hired to professionalize supervision in the late 1890s, Indiana's state visiting agents replaced almost as many children as they placed each year. They also visited children placed out by private charities. Agent William Streeter saw the farm as a factor in this replacement problem: “It has not been at all uncommon heretofore for parties to take children out of the orphans’ home in the spring, work them all summer, and bring them back in the fall, ragged and dirty, on some trumped-up excuse to the effect that they ‘didn't suit.’”Footnote ³⁰

With the increase in agent visits to placed-out children, increased scrutiny fell on the receiving families. The isolation of the farm, once seen as a benefit to dependent children who needed removal from bad influences, created an obstacle to visiting. With poor roads in some places and limited rail service in others, visitors struggled to reach children placed on farms. When they did manage to reach their destinations, visitors were encouraged to make unannounced visits, speak with children privately, and inspect farm homes.Footnote ³¹

State agents recorded a variety of observations and judgments about the households they visited. Wisconsin visitors noted whether or not families drank liquor and whether or not they employed hired hands. Indiana visitors annually rejected approximately one-fourth of the applicants for children. One Indiana state visitor noted, “The self-confidence of some applicants is truly wonderful. They expect that all they have to do is to ask, and as many children as they want will be turned over to them immediately.” In the applicants’ defense, ten years earlier this tactic may well have proven effective.Footnote ³²

Although not perfect, these methods did improve upon the earlier practice of allowing people to show up at an institution and pick out a child whose appearance suited them. Additionally, the effort at better onsite supervision enabled child-welfare organizations to rely less on the word of local people as to which of their neighbors would be suitable for a dependent child. The reporting of individual institutional practices at state and national meetings also increased accountability and professionalism of child-welfare workers. These improvements did increase the cost of placement, intrude on the privacy of placement families, and create various other challenges.Footnote ³³

By the 1910s the state of Illinois bore responsibility for keeping track of over 4,500 placed-out children.Footnote ³⁴ In 1917 alone, Illinois officials made initial placements of approximately 1,500 children in free homes. To keep track of all these children, two agencies, one state and one private, worked on supervision. The state agency spent $7,609—$4,320 just on travel—on visits to approximately half the placed-out children; this agency employed five visitors. To check in on the other half of Illinois's placed-out children, the Children's Home Finding Society (CHFS), with a staff of visitors, spent $7,600 on travel.Footnote ³⁵

The Farm under the Microscope

In 1912 a paid visitor for the state of Illinois filed a complaint regarding one of the children under his supervision. The child lived on a farm and spent most of his year in this home “making a hand” and husking corn. The farmer lost custody and was in addition fined for violating school attendance laws. The visitor recorded the farmer's reaction: “Vell, it would be mooch sheeper ven I hire a man.” The agent who brought the case to court claimed that the removal of this child forced other farmers in the neighborhood to send their placed-out children to school more frequently, lest they lose their “hands.”Footnote ³⁶

Convincing a neighborhood of farmers to send their placement children to school counted as only one of the challenges facing child-welfare supervisors. As reformers crusaded for better supervision of dependent children, they discovered that the farm, long the pillar of the placement system, hindered other goals, such as regular school attendance. The Illinois farmer fined in 1912 was by no means an exception.

Although the accepted rationale was the provision to dependent children of “healthy work” and a healthy work ethic, the placement system was opportune for many farmers. These farmers struggled to pay the high wages demanded by hired hands, who furthermore often could not be relied on during the busy seasons. As noted by the German farmer in the Illinois case, covering the costs of a dependent child who attended school might or might not be more expensive than a hired hand. Family efforts always dominated farm labor. The prospect of an additional set of hands in the form of a placed-out child served the needs of thousands of farmers at little expense.Footnote ³⁷ Throughout the Gilded Age, farmers’ movements drew attention to the financial straits experienced by numerous farmers and to the upheaval taking place in rural life throughout much of the country. Roosevelt was only one of the many prominent Americans to insist that farm families merited assistance because of the central role of the farm in forming and perpetuating American values. This image, of course, was the very thing that made farm families the popular choice for dependent children. Admirable traits such as faith, self-sufficiency, and patriotism were believed to derive from both rural families and the rural environment.Footnote ³⁸ The Roosevelt administration paid special attention to both dependent children and farm families. The belief that the egalitarian rural way of life deserved respect and support manifested itself not just in child-welfare policy but in measures such as the 1902 Newlands Reclamation Act, which emphasized that “rural homes are the safeguards of the nation, and the congestion of population in the great cities of the East is a growing menace to the stability of our republican institutions.”Footnote ³⁹ In the context of dependent children, rural homes also served as the safeguard to overcrowded children's institutions.

In 1907 the Commission on Country Life began studying problems associated with rural life. The Roosevelt administration encouraged imagery of the white agrarian producer-family to “invoke a sense of stability, a sense of naturalized order to be recreated by governmental management on a national scale.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Building upon Roosevelt's belief in the wholesomeness of farm life and its necessity for society overall, the Country Life movement proposed improvements to farming technology and practice. Country Life reformers also sought to provide farm wives with more home conveniences, while making improved education available to rural children. These ideas came to partial fruition during the 1910s in legislation such as the Smith-Lever and Smith-Hughes acts. On the surface, such attitudes also reinforced the system of rural placement.Footnote ⁴¹

In 1909 the White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children made recommendations for improvements in child welfare, which summarized suggestions already put forth at meetings such as the National Conference for Charities and Corrections. These recommendations included reducing the number of children removed from parents because of financial hardship. The U.S. Children's Bureau, founded in the years following the White House Conference, attempted to help rural families improve their situation by offering advice and education to rural women trying to raise children without modern conveniences. Programs to improve rural life, however, did not stem migration to the cities. The flight of rural youth may have opened up places for dependent children. If, however, residents regarded as the most desirable rural elements left, the best rural influences for dependent children presumably went with them. Communities once seen as a necessity for dependent children would be weakened.Footnote ⁴² Despite their increasing capitalization, midwestern farms still depended on family labor. Amid the increased federal attention to farm families, states and charities also increased the involvement of government in the placement process. Juvenile courts, supervisory visits, and inspections all affected farm placement.Footnote ⁴³

Some historians see the courts and the juvenile justice system as driving the movement to reform child placement. Initially, some judges who handled children's cases placed them on farms and dictated the composition of county boards of guardians assigned to supervise children; they worked within the existing system rather than overhauling customary practices. The courts helped states gain control of the child welfare system but did not necessarily dismantle rural placement.Footnote ⁴⁴ They did, however, develop in part because of “the necessity for preventive work, to correct abuses, remedy evils, and prevent unwise methods.” In positioning government in its new role, reformers determined that “the right of the State to interfere is unquestioned.”Footnote ⁴⁵

As more visitors and social workers participated in the active supervision of children placed on farms, they found little in rural life to recommend to dependent children. While expenditures on education remained high in many rural areas in the Midwest, spending for health and sanitation in the rural Midwest was the second lowest in the nation, ahead only of the South. Farm tenancy increased each decade between 1910 and 1930, by which time approximately 57 percent of midwestern farmers owned their own land, a decrease of almost 10 percent in twenty years.Footnote ⁴⁶ These issues, combined with changing ideas about acceptable levels of work for children, helped to prompt a shift in the reputation of the farm as a suitable placement option.

In discussing the changing image of rural placement, Solomon Schindler, superintendent of the Leopold Morse Home for Infirm Hebrews and Orphanage, disputed the idyllic image of rural life as “a boy standing beside a cow.” Instead, he charged, “Are there not unwritten histories of unhappy lives which are never published unless some especially flagrant crime against childhood has been committed?”Footnote ⁴⁷ Schindler's comments echoed those of a decade earlier by Homer Folks, whose notes about the problems facing placed-out children helped spur supervisory improvements. Folks complained that farm placement parents did not volunteer evenly throughout the year, an indication that they wanted children when the need for workers peaked. He further claimed that volunteers wanted only the most attractive or able-bodied children and returned “the weaker ones and those not quite old enough to work [and those who] seem[ed] especially liable to be morally perverse.” Folks resigned himself to the fact that without a payment attached to their care, placement children “are poorly supplied with clothing … they are not in any sense made members of the family. They see of the house only the kitchen and their sleeping room, which is shared by the hired man; they are shut off from the refining influences of the family, and work without pay. Thus many come to regard the days spent at the institution as their best.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Even placement children who received clothing and decent treatment often lacked the conveniences of modern American life simply because they lived with a farm family. Beyond all that, reformers questioned the relevance of teaching children farm skills when many of them would not remain on the farm.Footnote ⁴⁹ Increased supervision, along with more careful study of the experiences of dependent children, revealed that while some thrived on farms, others did not. This hypothetical description of a child not fit for the farm suggests how the image of farm placement was changing during the early twentieth century:

The boy best suited for the farm, according to Hastings Hart, was “a rather dull and backward but strong and good natured boy.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The virtuous American farm, once the savior of dependent children, gradually became categorized as a good refuge only for children for whom proper schooling or intellectual stimulation would be a waste.

Increased supervision gave children an outlet to express their own frustrations. During World War I, teenagers on Indiana farms complained to their visitors about not receiving wages for their work. They understood that workers were scarce and that their contribution possessed value. Their complaints reached the floor of the National Conference of Social Work, whose attendees offered their support for older placed-out children to earn wages, but nothing came of the idea in midwestern states.Footnote ⁵¹ Thirty years earlier, one state official had claimed that children needed to stay in their placement homes to “recognize their obligation to their state parent.”Footnote ⁵² By World War I, the state's obligation as a parent made more child-welfare officials hesitant to force children into a labor relationship on a farm, away from constant supervision, the ability to earn income, and the opportunities of urbanizing America.

Viviana Zelizer's study of the process of “pricing the priceless child” indicates that middle-class parents helped create the idea of a child with no immediate economic value. Farm children, by contrast, maintained tangible value because of the services they provided to their parents long after the placement system fell out of favor. Farm children did not become “priceless,” but the mainstream notion of a priceless childhood undercut the policy of dependent children working on farms. It proved difficult for progressives to treat some children as economically priceless while acknowledging and taking advantage of the value of other children to farmers as a way to keep them off the public dole. How could a child be both priceless and used “for the work they [farmers] can obtain from them”?Footnote ⁵³

Although efforts at better supervision for children placed on farms did provide more comprehensive records and better oversight, these improvements came with a cost. Once hired to oversee the cases of placed-out children, social workers and visitors needed to be in frequent contact with their charges; suggestions for at least two visits per child per year appeared as early as 1900. The travel expectations for this many visits spread across large midwestern states created a large workload and less efficient visiting. Folks summed up the need for these visits by remarking, “The first duty of a State towards its dependent children is to know where they are.” Yet this simple dictum had, in the past, proved challenging, especially when children were located on farms all over the state and left to make their own way without the help of a visitor.Footnote ⁵⁴

Removing the Farm Home from the System

That the farm fell out of favor as a new social welfare system developed during the Progressive Era is related to the rise of paid foster homes in urban and suburban locales. The farm diminished in esteem not only in child welfare, but in the national psyche as well. The increased supervision of placements and progressive research revealed serious deficiencies in rural life, which collided with the changing notions of childhood and with the perceived requirements of modern life.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although few large-scale studies of placed-out children took place in the Midwest, the U.S. Children's Bureau did try to contact children placed from the Wisconsin State School. The study revealed that placed-out children often felt like servants instead of family members. A majority of placed-out children did not maintain contact with placement families after their term ended. This research also illustrated problems with urban children performing farm work for which they were unprepared. Overall, only one-fifth of the placed-out children surveyed remained in their placement community as adults. Such results indicated that the goal of providing placed-out children with a family and community failed in a majority of the cases.Footnote ⁵⁶

Given the mixed results of supervisory visits, complaints from children, and the expense of re-placing children multiple times, the problems associated with rural placement motivated changes to the dependent child welfare system. Even though direct aid to families once languished as a highly unpopular option, reformers now came to see it as a viable alternative to the removal of children from parents. If children could be maintained in their own homes, farm placement no longer seemed as necessary. If children who needed new families could be placed closer to town, costs could be saved on supervision, even after figuring in stipends paid to foster families.

As scholars of social welfare such as Theda Skopcol and Michael Katz have shown, direct aid to struggling parents was adopted gradually and included visits and inspections, judgments and critiques.Footnote ⁵⁷ Programs for parents such as Mother's Aid, which varied widely by locale, arose alongside payments to families for fostering children. Families who accepted funds could then be held to a higher standard than free placement homes and subjected to more regular inspection. Farmers often treated inspections as intrusions and hassles. As one reformer summarized, “Shall not equally strict account be demanded from those who accept the care of other peoples’ children and appeal to the charitable public to be intrusted with money to defray the bill?”Footnote ⁵⁸ The transition to direct aid and foster care did not necessarily signal a newly developed desire for the sanctity of family; it indicated that the type of familial relationships sought through farm placement had not lived up to expectations.

Farm placement started as a way to provide children with good work habits and a positive family influence; supervision lagged in part because people trusted farmers to be honest and conscientious with dependent children. The element of work exchange in that relationship left room for exploitation. These concerns over the amount of work done in placements prompted the Children's Home and Aid Society to advertise for “free boarding homes” in 1917. The society claimed that these non-farm homes would be temporary refuges for children whose parents were in distress.Footnote ⁵⁹ As children became increasingly viewed as not subject to economic valuation, it became more difficult to justify the exchange of labor inherent in a farm placement. When a sufficient number of “free boarding homes” did not manifest themselves, paying a foster family to care for a child solved both the problem of children laboring on farms and the shortage of volunteers for free homes.

Continuing to allow children to do the work associated with farm placement proved problematic for reformers especially after World War I, when wage workers were valuable, children were complaining, and family-preservation policies kept an increasing number of able-bodied children with their biological families. For the most part, those children who remained in institutions lacked an identifiable family or needed specialized care. Some foster families were willing to provide homes for such “special needs” children, while the fee system hypothetically encouraged good treatment of the children.Footnote ⁶⁰ People willing to take in children for a payment might be working class, but they lived closer to supervisors, and the children themselves would not be required to work for the family's upkeep.Footnote ⁶¹

Foster or boarding payments, once seen as unnecessary on account of the inherent decency and kindness of farm families, now appeared to be a way to ensure that “well regulated families” took in children. This marked a fundamental change in the idea that plenty of “lonely homes” existed to take in dependent children. The new fee system put children in families and kept them out of long-term institutional care.Footnote ⁶² Fees for caring for dependent children went from seeming acceptable only in exceptional cases, such as very young or disabled children, to seeming a viable alternative for numerous children, one that complemented the expectation for a childhood of delayed responsibility.Footnote ⁶³

Scholars who analyze the transition in child-welfare policies during and after the Progressive Era focus on divisions between charities and government agencies. For example, John Sutton argues that private charities and those whom he labels “mainstream” reformers worked at cross purposes; the resultant divisions inside the dependent child welfare movement led ultimately to long-term changes. His argument, along with that of Matthew Crenson, highlights problems between Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic children's charities, in part on account of efforts by the Protestant groups to convert children through placement with Protestant families.Footnote ⁶⁴ Although important, such divisions and trends do not explain the repudiation of farm placement, the preferred alternative for nearly a half-century.

W.H. Slingerland, a Progressive Era authority on child welfare, attributed changing attitudes toward rural placement to improved education and sanitation in cities as compared to the less advanced conditions on farms.Footnote ⁶⁵ In 1914, standards recommended by the National Conference for Charities and Corrections accelerated the turn away from farm placement simply by suggesting multiple visits by placing agents, along with an emphasis on homes “restricted to distances within ready supervision of the organization legally responsible for the child.” Such a provision may have also reflected distaste for out-of-state placements; ultimately it encompassed farms spread across a county or state.Footnote ⁶⁶ As one directive for placements explained, “Formerly it was supposed that nearly all the best available homes would be found on farms, and placement in towns and cities was not specially advocated or magnified. Experience has demonstrated that many of the best homes are in populous centers, and probably more children are now placed in towns and cities than on farms.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Paid foster homes ensured that homes within easy distances could be located and that the job of foster parent went to urban or suburban dwellers of the working class, where it remained into the twenty-first century.

After World War I, urban and suburban residents continued to move ahead of farm families in technology, household standards, and hygiene. Migration of rural people into cities and towns increased. The 1920s saw a transition in dependent child welfare, as free placement homes gave way to direct aid to parents or foster parents. The decline of the farm home as a proper place for dependent children became increasingly clear during the difficult decade of the 1920s, when farmers struggled with low prices and high costs. During the Great Depression and the New Deal era, the rural communities once charged with caring for dependents became dependents themselves.

The farm home featured prominently in decades’ worth of planning for dependent children. Its decline as a care solution came after attempts to improve farm placement by increasing the protection of children through supervision and better record keeping. Progressives began centralizing dependent child care after debates about childhood institutionalization brought to light deficiencies of not only institutions, but the farm placement system as well. The national emphasis on seeking free homes to accept dependent children appeared in every state and in every type of institution, but particularly in the Midwest, where farmers accepted thousands of children from a wide variety of institutions. States and charities in the Midwest developed a social-welfare framework to aid in a process once controlled at the institutional level. As the placement system grew, the ability to supervise and protect placed-out children lagged, leaving a disappointing record of abused, neglected, and lost children who possessed few of the bonds to family and place so optimistically envisioned by reformers.

Increased supervision of placed-out children appeared alongside progressive attempts to bring the farm into the modern era. The Country Life Commission, the agricultural extension service, the U.S. Children's Bureau, and other organizations and programs brought to light considerable evidence concerning actual conditions on American farms. This in turn sparked doubts as to whether farm placement really served the interests of dependent children. Aspects of farm placement that had once seemed beneficial now appeared to be defects. The isolation of farms, once seen as a way to remove dependent children from negative influences, made supervision of placed-out children difficult and expensive. The work performed by children on farms, once seen as conducive to a strong work ethic, became an embarrassment to reformers who championed increased schooling and vilified child labor. No single impetus—the idea of a sacred childhood, conflict among religious groups, the increased importance attached to biological families, or the specialization of institutions—can account for the era's transformation in child care. The decline of farm placement needs to be factored into the mix.

In 1900, boarding, paid foster care, and legal adoption accounted for only a small segment of child-welfare policy in the United States. Twenty years later, emphasis had shifted toward permanent familial relationships and urban foster families, who received fees to accept dependent children (and by extension child-welfare supervisors) into their homes. The farm played little further part in child-welfare policy; the farm family could not be both recipient and provider of aid. Children still went out into homes, and farmers still needed laborers, but conditions connecting the two changed.Footnote ⁶⁸ This transition represented above all a failure of the farm to serve the perceived needs of dependent children.

The system that was created after the demise of the farm placement home came to function as the primary care provider for hundreds of thousands of dependent children. Amid constant battles over welfare dollars, foster care remained the preferred option when families were separated by calamity or the courts. Ironically, concerns voiced about paying people to take in children in the early twentieth century resonated in the early twenty-first century amid questions over the suitability of families who took in children for a fee. Critics claimed that undeserving adults used foster-care payments for personal gain while exploiting dependent children. Stories filled the media of foster children abused, killed, unsupervised, or lost in the system. Indeed, the weaknesses of the foster-home system eventually corresponded to problems that progressives sought to remedy in farm placements over one hundred years earlier.Footnote ⁶⁹