Saving the children: Discourses of race, nation, and citizenship in America (Charles Loring Brace, Jacob A. Riis, Julia Lathrop, Grace Abbott)

This dissertation connects the discourses of race and civilization to the growth of the welfare state in the United States from the second half of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. The growing community concern with poor children in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was contingent on a notion of racialized citizenship formed upon a base of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Children functioned as an important symbol and resource in struggles over citizenship and nation as the nation expanded across the continent and beyond. Part of sharing in the fantasy of Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority, for many social reformers such as Jacob Riis and Jane Addams, was ensuring that all of the nation's children and future citizens received care and attention. This dissertation analyzes the work of the following four significant figures to excavate connections between childhood, citizenship, and the civilizing mission: Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children's Aid Society; Jacob Riis, author of the famous How the Other Half Lives; Julia Lathrop, resident of Hull House and first director of the U.S. Children's Bureau; and Grace Abbott, professor at the University of Chicago and second director of the Children's Bureau.