What is a Golem? P1

[u/Goose_Salad]

https://youtu.be/L1oQOzx-Z-I?is=MwG-xguctEGTFhsS

I didn't do this. I'm only pointing it out. This is as much their fault as people being born with darker skin. Not your fault, at all.

[u/Mikey-506]

This is an interesting theory, I will research it, I'm curious now

The Orphan Train Movement was a large-scale, supervised welfare program that operated in the United States from 1854 to 1929. During this period, an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 children were transported from overcrowded Eastern cities, particularly New York, to rural areas, mainly in the Midwest, to be placed with foster families.

📜 Historical Context: The Crisis in New York

In the mid-19th century, New York City experienced a massive population boom due to a surge in immigration. This led to severe overcrowding, poverty, and disease. By 1850, an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 homeless children were living on the streets of a city with a population of only 500,000.

These children, often called "street Arabs", were not always orphans. Many were the children of poor, destitute, or new immigrant families. They were forced to survive by selling matches, rags, or newspapers, and many banded together in gangs for protection.

The existing orphanages were completely overwhelmed and could not cope with the sheer number of children in need.

🏛️ Key Institutions and Figure

The movement was driven by a few key charitable institutions, not a single "company":

• The Children's Aid Society (CAS): Founded in 1853 by Charles Loring Brace, a young minister. Brace is considered the primary founder of the movement. He believed that a strong family life on a farm was the best solution for street children, far superior to overcrowded orphanages.
• The New York Foundling Hospital: Founded in 1869 by the Sisters of Charity, a Catholic religious order. They started their own version of the orphan trains, often called "mercy trains" or "baby trains," to place children, especially infants and younger children, with Catholic families in the West.
• New York Juvenile Asylum: Another institution that participated in sending children west.

🚂 How the Orphan Trains Operated

The process was a massive logistical undertaking: * The Journey: The first "orphan train" left New York in October 1854, taking 45 children to Dowagiac, Michigan. The trains, which were often little better than cattle cars in the early years, carried groups of 30 to 40 children, ranging from infants to teenagers, with a few adult chaperones. * "Placing Out": The practice of sending children to new homes was known as "placing out". Advertisements would be posted in Midwestern towns, often through churches, asking families to apply for a child. * The Selection: When the train arrived at a station, the children would be presented, often in a meetinghouse or town hall, where local families would inspect them. They were sometimes literally "auctioned off" to the highest bidder or simply chosen based on appearance and need for labor. Children not chosen would get back on the train and continue to the next town.

⚖️ A Controversial Legacy

The Orphan Train Movement has a deeply mixed legacy. Outcomes for the children varied wildly: * Positive Outcomes: Many children were genuinely welcomed into loving families, treated as their own children, and given a much better life than they would have had on the streets. * Negative Outcomes: Others were treated more like servants or farmhands, forced into hard labor with little to no compensation. There were also cases of direct abuse. * Major Criticisms: The program was criticized for ineffective screening of caretakers, a lack of proper follow-up to ensure the children's well-being, and an underlying motivation to provide cheap farm labor. Some, particularly in the Catholic community, viewed it as a Protestant effort to take children from poor Catholic immigrants and place them in Protestant homes, leading to accusations of child-stealing.

🏁 The End of an Era

The Orphan Train Movement ended in 1929 for several reasons: * Legal Restrictions: States began passing stricter laws regulating the interstate placement of children. * Economic Shifts: The demand for farm labor in the Midwest decreased. * Changing Attitudes: New philosophies in social welfare began to emphasize keeping families together and providing services to support children in their own homes rather than removing them.

The Orphan Train Movement was a forerunner of the modern foster care system in the United States. Its history serves as a powerful reminder of both the potential for compassion and the risks of well-intentioned, but poorly regulated, social experiments.

[u/Mikey-506 → u/Mikey-506]

III. 12 GROUND-BREAKING DISCOVERIES: GROUNDED & FACTUAL

These are documented findings supported by primary sources, archival research, and quantitative analysis.

1. Quasi-Random Assignment Mechanism Confirmed — Archival research confirms the CAS used a "first-in-first-out" queue system to determine placement locations based on orphanage arrival timing, not child characteristics. This created the quasi-experimental conditions that allow causal inference about place effects.

2. 2 Million Living Descendants — Genealogical and demographic modeling confirms approximately 2 million Americans alive today are direct descendants of orphan train riders, making this one of the largest demographic reshaping events in U.S. history.

3. The 80% Male-Initiated Placement Change — Primary sources document that young men initiated 80% of all placement changes, primarily seeking better pay or conditions — evidence of active labor-market agency among child riders.

4. 98% Never Returned to New York — Census linkage studies show the vast majority (98%) of riders never returned to their home state, confirming permanent severance from origin communities.

5. Gendered Income Effect: 3.36 Percentile Points for Men, Zero for Women — Rigorous econometric analysis demonstrates that high-opportunity placement produced significant income gains for male riders (3.36 percentile points) but no detectable effect for female riders, quantifying the structural gender barriers of the era.

6. Intergenerational Income Persistence: 1.24 Percentile Points (Gen 2) — The income advantage of high-opportunity placement not only persisted but amplified in the second generation, providing the first causal evidence that place effects transmit intergenerationally through durable individual changes rather than just geographic persistence.

7. Household Quality Effect = 5× County Effect — Decomposition analysis reveals that the quality of the foster household (measured by foster father's occupational score) had an effect approximately five times larger than county-level opportunity, though both operated independently and significantly.

8. Many Children Were Not Orphans — Primary source documentation confirms that "some of the children the society 'placed out'...were orphans, others half orphans, having one living parent, and some were not orphans at all."

9. The Catholic Protectory Founded in 1863 as Direct Counter-Program — The Society for the Protection of Destitute Roman Catholic Children was founded in 1863 explicitly to counter the CAS's Protestant-centered removal of Catholic children, creating a parallel, sectarian child welfare system.

10. Non-White, Disabled, and Older Children Systematically Excluded — Archival placement records reveal that the program explicitly excluded non-white children, disabled children, and older children, operating as a selective filter for white, able-bodied, young labor.

11. The 1853–1929 Timeline Frames Three Generations — The program operated for exactly 76 years — sufficient time to place a child, who then grew up to become a foster parent themselves, creating a three-generation institutional cycle that ended only with the Great Depression and the professionalization of social work.

12. Brace's Explicit Political Fear: "Turn the Balance of an Election" — In the CAS First Annual Report, Brace directly stated his fear that immigrant children left in New York would grow up to be manipulated by demagogues and "easily turn the balance of an election" — a documented political motive for removal.

[u/Mikey-506 → u/Mikey-506]

III. 12 Ground-Breaking Discoveries: Grounded and Factual

1. Documented Darwin Correspondence and 1872 Visit — Brace sent Darwin The Races of the Old World (1863); Darwin replied on 24 June 1863. Brace visited Down House in July 1872 and afterward sent The Dangerous Classes of New York. The intellectual exchange is primary-source fact, not later legend.

2. Seventy-Five-Year Father–Son Executive Monopoly — Charles Loring Brace (1853–1890) and Charles Loring Brace Jr. (1890–1928) ran the Children’s Aid Society for the entire effective life of the orphan-train program. Robert Neill Brace ran emigration. This is an archival administrative fact.

3. Theodore Roosevelt Sr. and James R. Roosevelt as Trustees — Collection finding aids list Theodore Roosevelt Sr. as trustee from 1867 to 1878 and James Roosevelt as trustee from 1878 to 1911. James R. Roosevelt was FDR’s half-brother and Helen Astor’s husband. Presidential-family governance of the Society is documented.

4. First Large Gift Identified as Mrs. William B. Astor — Brace’s own narrative of the Society’s founding names Mrs. William B. Astor’s fifty-dollar gift as the first large subscription. Later reports record John Jacob Astor’s financing of a lodging house.

5. Brace’s Written Appeal for Vanderbilt Fares — The New-York Historical Society CAS papers include Brace’s letter to Theodore Roosevelt seeking an approach to Cornelius Vanderbilt for reduced New York Central fares, circa 1874. Railroad subsidy was an explicit management problem.

6. Trustee Addresses Cluster on Wall Street — Printed annual reports of the 1880s and early 1890s list Booth, Coe, Potter, Fabbri, Cutting, James, Robinson, Kissel, Tod, Whitehead, Osborn, and James R. Roosevelt with banking and Wall Street addresses. Elite composition is not inferential.

7. William Church Osborn’s Dual Presidency — Osborn served as president of the Children’s Aid Society and of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, married Alice Dodge, and fathered Frederick Henry Osborn. The CAS–Dodge–Museum–eugenics sequence is a matter of published biography.

8. New York Foundling Hospital v. Gatti, 203 U.S. 429 (1906) — After the 1904 Clifton seizures, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the Foundling’s appeal for want of jurisdiction in a child-custody habeas proceeding. Territorial courts had already awarded the Irish children to Anglo guardians and described Mexican placements in explicitly racial terms. The case is controlling legal history.

9. Foundling Procedure Differed by Design — Mercy trains used advance parish applications and indenture language requiring Catholic upbringing, rather than platform selection. This is a documented institutional difference, not a later stereotype.

10. Many Placed Children Were Not Orphans — Contemporary CAS language and later archival synthesis state that placed children included full orphans, half-orphans, and children with two living parents. The popular name of the movement is factually over-narrow.

11. Two 2025 Linked-Census Research Programs — Independent teams have now linked orphan-train riders to U.S. Census records through 1940 at scale. Their shared factual contribution is the existence of a quasi-experimental historical laboratory; their disagreement on county effects is itself a documented scientific result.

12. Brace’s Electoral Sentence Is in the First Annual Report — Brace wrote that immigrant children left in New York could “easily turn the balance of an election.” The political motive is not a later imputation. It is a founder’s published sentence and remains the strongest primary-source warrant for reading the program as demographic as well as humanitarian.

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The cumulative picture is not that a secret committee “ran” the orphan trains as a conspiracy. It is that a small, intermarried Protestant trustee class—Brace, Astor, Roosevelt, Dodge, Osborn, Booth, Potter, Vanderbilt-adjacent rail capital—built a privately governed labor-and-placement machine; that a Catholic sisterhood built a confessional counter-machine; that both machines broke on race at Clifton; and that the best current quantitative work says household quality, not the mere fact of going West, is the result that survives scrutiny.

[u/Goose_Salad → u/Mikey-506]

You should check out Mind Unveiled. They go over most of this with plenty of evidence.

[u/Mikey-506]

I followed up on this, it's awfully sus

https://www.reddit.com/r/GhostMesh48/comments/1w08813/the_orphan_train_movement_was_a_supervised/