UC San Diego

“Street Children” argues that St. Louis shaped the nation’s child reform movement and that the Civil War inspired reformers to seek novel solutions to child reform in the following decades. During the war, a cascade of refugees, orphans, and freed slave children descended on St. Louis, straining its existing children’s institutions. The dissertation illuminates and recovers the lives of many of the marginalized children struggling under wartime hardship. Reformers reckoning with the crisis produced new institutions and a new consensus that the state owed care to displaced and orphaned children of Union soldiers. After the war, child reformers expanded their focus and drew from German thought and familial reform models intended to boost the state’s role in child reform and fold marginalized children into real and imagined institutional families. This dissertation links St. Louis to a growing national and international child reform movement that laid the foundation for Progressive Era child reform.