Adoption and American Empire: Migration, Race-making, and the Child, 1845-1988

Abstract

In the United States, between 1854 and 1929, more than 150,000 working class youth were transported by “orphan trains” from their urban eastern city homes to live with families in the (primarily) rural American West. Since 1953, more than 150,000 adopted Korean children have migrated into U.S. families. Both during and in-between these orphan trains and Korean adoptions, Americans have also experimented with such child placement practices linked to nineteenth century black codes and boarding schools, twentieth century child welfare movements (at home and abroad), and postwar international adoptions. As patterns of mobility and migration have changed alongside technology and transportation modernization, imperial expansion, and the growth and consolidation of nation-states, child placement practices have also changed. Reflecting the specificity of each time and place, adoption and child placement discourse has historically been rife with tensions between sentiment and economics, exploitation and humanitarianism. While adoption implies the permanent transfer of a child away from the biological parent(s) to another person, the reasons, motivations, social practices, as well as the legal and cultural parameters of adoption have changed dramatically and unevenly in the modern era of nation-states. My dissertation utilizes “child placement” as its central frame of analysis to more accurately document the wide array of practices in U.S history that have historically involved the separation of children from their birth parents, to live under the authority of other adults. Adoption and American Empire examines the relationship between migration, race-making, and child placement as central and strategic components in America’s consolidation as a nation-state and expansion as a global empire, between 1845 and 1988. In three parts that transverse the historical periods of U.S. Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, interwar years, and post-World War II, I document continuity and transformation between older forms of child placement undertaken for child labor needs (such as with African American children during Reconstruction) and modern forms of adoption for humanitarian or sentimental reasons (including refugee and “orphan” children from West Germany). By linking these histories, I demonstrate that child placement is always inextricably tied to United States’ practices and discourses of empire and race. Few scholars have explored the linkages between these different forms of child placement. By employing the methods of social and cultural history, as well as multiple scales of analysis (comparative, regional, national, transnational) across an expansive archive of source material (state, immigration, and U.S. military government law, regional and national newspapers, the ethnic press, government reports, the U.S. congressional record, and archival documents), I illuminate the historic continuities and structures of power embedded in these seemingly disconnected practices. Ultimately, my dissertation contends that Americans’ practices of child placement and adoption have served as powerful tools of U.S. empire, employed widely when their implementation would assist the nation’s larger geopolitical and economic objectives. Always undergirded by nationalist racial logics, the children themselves would be increasingly valued as they came to encompass both the real and symbolic vision of how the United States imagined itself, or wished to be imagined, by its global peers.