The Orphan Trains : Feeling Small

Orphan trains and Carlisle and the ways people from the past undermined the minorities and children of America. The film "The orphan Trains" tells us the story of children who were taken from the streets of New York City and put on trains to rural America. A traffic in immigrant children were developed and droves of them teamed the streets of New York (A People's History of the United States 1492-present, 260). The streets of NYC were dirty, overcrowded, and dangerous. Just as street gangs had female auxiliaries, they also had farm leagues for children (These are the Good Old Days, 19). During the time of the late 1800's and early 1900's many people were trying to help children. Progressive reformers, often called

In the late 1800s , America became the land of new opportunities and new beginnings and New York City became the first landmark for immigrants. New York City was home to Ellis Island, the area in which migrants were to be handed for freedom to enter the nation. Living in New York City gave work and availability to ports. In time the city gave the chance to outsider's to construct groups with individuals from their nation , they were classified as new and old settlers. Old outsiders included Germans, Irish and, English. The new outsiders incorporated those from Italy, Russia, Poland and Austria-Hungary. In 1875, the New York City populace was a little 1 million individuals contrasted with the 3,5 million it held when the new century

In the years preceding the war, a new wave of immigrants came to the United States fleeing the potato famine of 1845 and 1846 in Ireland. A few of the immigrants remained in the Southern entry ports of Charleston and New Orleans. However, the majority swelled the numbers in the Northern cities where they found work in the factories. By 1857, the number of factory workers had risen to 1.2 million, and the industrial labor force had risen to almost 1 million people working an average of sixty-eight to seventy-two hours a week.

During the late 1800s, inhabitants from all parts of the world made the decision to leave their jobs and homes to immigrate to the United States. They fled rising taxes, famine, crop failure, land and job shortages, to come to the United States. Perceived to be one of the greater countries for economic opportunity, many sought freedom from religious and political persecution. Around twelve million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1870 and 1900. Before the Civil War, the majority of immigrants were from Germany, Ireland, and England. There would be a drastic change in the next three decades. After the Civil War, immigrants

Between 1854 and 1929 the United States was engaged in an ambitious, and ultimately controversial, social experiment to rescue poor and homeless children, the Orphan Train Movement. The Orphan Trains operated prior to the federal government’s involvement in child protection and child welfare. While they operated, Orphan Trains moved approximately 200,000 children from cities like New York and Boston to the American West to be adopted. Many of these

Tenement life was tough in New York City at the turn of the nineteenth century, as portrayed in the historical novel, City of Orphans. This portrayal depicted an immigrant family that was living hand to mouth in a tenement. This depiction is very accurate to the harsh reality that many families had to come to face. It was tough from the conditions, lifestyles, and space. Maks ' family was barely living off their earnings and was susceptible to disease and fraud. The immigrants were easy targets for poverty and sickness, and all too often fell through cracks in the floor. Their lives, as bad as they were, were not as bad as the ones they led in the countries they fled from to escape prosecution and to seek a better life.

In the late 1800s, people from other countries across the world choose to leave their homes and move to the United States. United States was seen as the land of economic opportunity at this time because of famine, land and job shortages, and rising taxes in their countries. Many others desired personal freedom or to escape political and religious persecution. Between 1870 and 1900, over 12 million immigrants arrived in hopes of a promising future. The majority of these immigrants were from England, Ireland, and Germany. Immigrants from Europe commonly entered from ports on the East Coast and settled nearby. However, there were a few immigrants who were attracted by lands for farming and moved inland.

“The Jews were transported, either by trains or trucks to six camps; Poland, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek-Lublin. These camps were called extermination camps. The trips on the train took a few hours and sometimes it took days. The people were crammed into boxcars until there was no room for anyone to move. Freight cars had no seats, no bathroom facilities, and only slatted openings as windows, so inside it was dark, and the air reeked with the smell of bodies and human waste” (Bachrach, 1994, p. 48). Mendy Berger, a Holocaust survivor remembered the train ride and stated, “One hundred people standing in a locked railroad car, no food, no water, people dying, the smell of the dead, and we had no toilets. We did it right where we were standing, and we couldn’t move away from it” (Adler 1989, p. 67). Arthur Rubin, another Holocaust survivor recounts “children were crying for water, and mothers’ hearts were torn because they were unable to help them…..The train stopped at various stations. There were women standing near the railroad tracks with

family. As the story progresses they are herded into train cars in a scene of panic and chaos. The train

Contrary to its name, the Orphan Train riders included not only orphans, but also children with only one parent, children that were given up because their family was too big, and runaways. These children often underwent parental death, abandonment, or prostitution. Still other orphans were immigrant children. They suffered from the overpopulation of New York and lack of job availability. Even the jobs they could get did not pay enough for them to survive. Many of the orphans turned to selling small items such as newspapers or matches to survive on the streets. These children often formed gangs to protect themselves from the sometimes violent world of street life in New York City. Police, after finding some of these gangs,

(Miflin, 2014) Health of children in the 19th century wasn’t good; working twelve to sixteen hours a day with hardly any rest would make the children exhausted and would have likely suffered from fatigue. They also would go without food, and would end up falling ill as a result of lack of nutrition. As well as being exhausted, hungry and generally not well, children working over machines would often have bowed legs and their limbs and muscles would be poorly developed. Factories were not the only work children would take on, some children would be sent down the mines and work under ground. Mines were extremely dangerous, and children would work without any sunlight for hours on end, this resulting in a lack of vitamin D. children would be forced to carry heavy equipment whilst traveling on foot through water. If children were not working they would be out on the streets, finding food and looking for safe places to sleep the night, that is if they weren’t at home with families, some families would disown their children kicking them to the streets or to be taken into the orphanage. This would have had major impact on their health as the streets would be riddled with disease, the water wasn’t pure and the food wasn’t easy to find. The cold would have hit them and children would often die after the first week of been on the streets. In 1899 the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was founded (NSPCC) making children’s live that bit

This quote I found from an online article explains what kids went through during this harsh time. It almost sounds like they were slaves by how low they were getting paid. Most of us have never even heard of kids working late at nights doing jobs that today no one can possibly do because they have been replaced with machines from the dangers they carry. Children worked some of the most dangerous factory jobs that existed and they didn’t by choice. They had no choice but to work because either their family was poor or they were orphans.

“The themes of the play are Two Trains Running is a political play that makes extended reference to the black power movement and its impact on poor urban communities like the Hill District of Pittsburgh. The issue of continued white oppression of African Americans and the response of the black community during the 1960s is at the foreground of the characters ' experience. The community surrounding the restaurant is undergoing a major redevelopment, probably one which has been precipitated by the social initiatives that came in the wake of the civil rights movement. However, the legal rights and privileges that the African American community won during the 1950s and 1960s do not seem necessarily to extend to impoverished city-dwellers. An underlying sense of tragedy and hopelessness pervades even short-term victories such as the city awarding Memphis thirty-five thousand dollars, since Memphis remains estranged from his wife and has the foreboding..”

After World War One, Europe and Asia were in chaos. Many European people were without a home, a job and way of life. Desperate, hundreds of thousands immigrated to more stable and industrialized nations such as the United States of America. From 1915 to 1919, an average of over two-hundred thirty-four thousand immigrants per year came to the United States of America (Cohn 2). A large number of these immigrants came from Europe and were processed at Ellis Island in New York City. Forty percent of all Americans can trace their heritage to Ellis Island (United States Department of the Interior). Ellis Island was so overcrowded with people, the government hurriedly built dormitories, kitchens, and hospitals (United States Department of the Interior). When these people came, they arrived in over-crowded boats from unclean places. Due to widespread disease in the boats, there were many burials at sea. One of these burials quite ironically, was my great-uncle who was four-years-old. Upon arrival, from Italy, my great-aunt was buried. When the immigrants arrived, government

     When they arrived at the camps, most of the families who were shipped out together, ended up being separated. Often, the transports were a sampling of what went on in the camps: cruelty by the officers, near starvation of those being transported, as well as fetid and unsanitary conditions. For the people who survived the trip, it was just the beginning of the living nightmare that they would face inside the walls of Auschwitz.