Little Magazines and Little Wanderers: Building Advocate Networks for Adoption during the Progressive Era

Abstract

The Chicago-based National Children's Home Society (NCHS), founded by the Rev. Martin Van Arsdale in the early 1890s, maintained that orphanages could be emptied and the nation spared the expense of “restraining criminals” if permanent adoptive homes could be found for every neglected, abused, or abandoned child. Adoption met with fierce resistance from charities that depended on state subsidies and private donations to care for children in orphanages and later from such diverse critics as eugenicists and newly professionalized social workers. Nevertheless, adoption gradually gained adherents during the Progressive Era among civic leaders and families wanting to raise these “chicks of another brood” as their own.

This article considers the practical uses and rhetorical strategies of little magazines published during the Progressive Era that were intended to set a new agenda for child saving and build a constituency for adoption through dozens of independent, state-based Protestant home-finding societies federated under the NCHS umbrella. Little magazines were sold by subscription and mailed monthly to tens of thousands of individual supporters for the purpose of raising donations, finding adoptive homes, and advocating adoption as social welfare policy. To this end, NCHS modeled its appeal on popular magazines of the period, publishing letters and human interest stories, rescue narratives and advice columns, poetry and sentimental fiction, photographs, and even musical scores to persuade families—but primarily women—to donate and adopt. This article employs social movement theory to argue that NCHS used these little magazines during the Progressive Era to reframe child-saving discourse to include adoption and build effective advocacy networks for adoption at the grassroots level.