The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them

In 1872, a reformer's urgent dispatch from the front lines of Gilded Age poverty. Charles Loring Brace spent twenty years among New York City's most abandoned children, and this book is his dispatch. He documents the cramped tenements, the child laborers, the orphaned and runaway youth who wandered streets that saw them only as future criminals. Brace argues with passionate conviction that these so-called "dangerous classes" are not born evil but made dangerous by neglect, overcrowding, and despair. His solution was radical for its era: not prisons, but schools; not punishment, but reform. He founded the Children's Aid Society and pushed for industrial schools, lodging houses, and adoption programs that gave thousands of children alternate paths. This is a primary document from the birth of American social work, sometimes uncomfortable in its Victorian assumptions but unmistakably sincere in its desire to rescue children from ruin. For readers interested in the origins of progress, or in understanding how reformers saw poverty before the Progressive Era.