Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves
Odds & ends
Illinois past and present, as seen by James Krohe Jr.
The Corn Latitudes
Afterword
Fixing Kids: Illinois' Programs for Children
Illinois Tax Foundation
1993
I met Jim Nowlan in 1968 when he was running for lieutenant governor with Richard Ogilvie. He was (still is) bright and likeable and perceptive. Such people often have a hard time finding a place in Illinois public life, but Jim found several places, making himself useful as a teacher and administrator and essayist.
One of his gigs was research director of the Illinois Tax Foundation, the non-political arm of the Taxpayers Federation of Illinois, which plausibly called itself the state's most respected non-partisan tax and fiscal policy advocacy organization.
Jim asked me to prepare a major analysis of non-school programs for children in Illinois. I interviewed agency staff, consultants, academics, and advocates, and boiled it down into a 80-some-page document we called Fixing Kids: Illinois' Programs for Children (Illinois Tax Foundation, Springfield, Ill., 1993). I feared at the time that I'd failed to deliver what I’d promised; I was delighted many years later to learn that Jim had not been embarrassed by it.
Did Fixing Kids fix even one kid? No. Its specific prescriptions are now out of date of course and the whole document is not worth reprinting here. The failures I lament in it, sadly, remain too current, which makes my Afterword still worth reading. I think.
Most of the "new" ideas being floated in Illinois have in fact been tried here before. Reform school is being reborn as today's "residential school," and about the only difference between old-fashioned case work and "family preservation"-style intervention is the name. The elaboration of due process protections for minors facing state intervention, family-first adoption policies, the mainstreaming of the physically disabled children—all these reprise practices that in some cases were first tried prior to the Civil War. As historian Joan Gittens puts it, "All the late 20th century provisions for children have a deja vu quality about them."
A new attitude may be needed more than a new agenda when it comes to improving the lives of children in Illinois. The state's official attitudes toward children's services still harbor a lingering Christian faith in redemption (expressed in social terms by the Protestant uplift that inspired progressives of the last century) that assumes failure to be personal and psychological rather than social and , economic. What religion proposed, science eventually seconded; Freudianism reinforced that view by focusing therapists' attention on the individual psyche as the root of maladjustment.
In reality, of course, neither societies nor families can be understood apart from the other, and policy needs to take cognizance of both. If one assumes that abusive families merely happen also to be poor—that poverty is correlated to family dysfunction but does not cause it—then the problem is bad parenting, which is something that can be cured by teaching. But if one assumes that families become abusive because they are poor—if in effect child neglect becomes a symptom rather than a problem—then the problem is poverty, which suggests an effort of a wholly different kind and scale.
Bureaucracies are vastly better at prevention than cures, if only because preventive programs have a scale and a structure that match that of the agencies. The agency is less appropriate as social physician. A bureaucracy can't be compelled to act like a family; unfortunately, a lot of families can't be compelled to act like a family either. And the only alternative to the state's attentions for dependent children remains abandonment and early death.
Most of what are usually labeled "children's problems" are in fact something else. Poverty is not a child welfare problem but an economic one. Medicaid spending for children is merely another aspect of the larger confusion concerning U.S. health care, which overemphasizes high-tech interventions at the expense of more valuable preventive care.
Public spending on children has several recurring rationales, each of which is persuasive at its historical moment. One decade its purpose is to rescue poor children from their parents, the next to provide custodial care so that mothers without means might be self-sustaining, and after that to provide the benefits of an "ideal home" to those without one.
In each case these reforms sprung from a middle class acting in its own interest, either protectively or (to use today's jargon) proactively. A century ago, when Illinois first began many of its present child welfare programs, the object was not necessarily to ease suffering (although doubtless many good-hearted people hoped it would). The unstated hope was that intervention could relieve the threat from an unsocialized, disease-ridden, and violent underclass whose children menaced property and propriety.
Spending on children, in short, rose when the middle class found itself in uncomfortable proximity to the unlucky, mainly poor. Since World War 11 in particular, proximity no longer is much of a prod to public spending. More and more Illlnoisans have been able to avoid the social costs of neglect by fleeing to the suburbs, just as the fiscal costs were disguised by near-constant economic growth.
In a shrinking economy, other people's children are competitors for public resources, and it probably should not surprise us that the public mood has turned mean. With wealth enough to provide for their own children's needs, and with distance insulating them from day-to-day consequences of unhappiness elsewhere, the accepted rationale for public spending among the comfortable no longer has much less force.
True, part of the reluctance to spend money is owed to lack of faith that government programs work, but we must ask whether those programs have ever been run in ways that might have made them work. Joan Gittens for one argues that climbing aboard the very crowded child abuse bandwagon is a way for people to express their concern for the unfortunate children of the poor without committing themselves to doing anything about the poverty, bad schools, and general collapse of the working-class economy that created it. Project HEART, for instance, gives good-hearted people a chance to speed adoptions rather than undertake reforms in Illinois—including educational and economic revitalization—that might make fewer adoptions necessary in the first place.
There is darkness near the heart of our feelings about children that few people wish to peer into. The failures of Illinois's child welfare system, insists one discouraged reformer in a typical lament, are "not just a question of law or administration but our enduring values—what we think about children." If we tolerate unkindness, even injustice toward the young, perhaps it's because we've contrived a system in which the people who suffer the most are those who are least powerful to protect themselves.
Until policymakers depart from the premise, central to Illinois child welfare for a century, that the cure for the pain suffered by the young because of social breakdown or individual pathology is to fix the child rather than society or the adult, that cure will never come. Illinois's political culture and its humanitarian instincts are still at odds.
The generally abysmal performance by state institutions and agencies (including that of the General Assembly when it comes to funding both) is the result neither of accident or of indifference but an expression of collective political will. A political culture that overvalues the family and undervalues government will find itself at odds with itself when it is obliged to act as family for its children whose own family has failed them in some significant way. ●
SITES
OF
INTEREST
Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.
One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.
See Home Page/Learn/
Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.
The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.
The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.
A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.
Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois
Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."
Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards, posters, and videos.
The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.
“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.
I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered."
Illinois Labor History Society
The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like.
Illinois Migration History 1850-2017
The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly.
An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than
2,000 words.)
BOOKS
OF INTEREST
Southern Illinois University Press 2017
A work of solid history, entertainingly told.
Michael Burlingame,
author of Abraham
Lincoln: A Life
One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.
Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018
A lively and engaging study . . . an enthralling narrative.
James Edstrom
The Annals of Iowa
A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians
as well as local historians generally.
John Hoffman
Journal of Illinois HIstory
A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.
Harold Henderson
Midwestern Microhistory
A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.
Greg Hall
Journal of the Illinois
State Historical Society
Click here
to buy the book
Southern Illinois University Press
SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.
The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more. Of particular note are its Prairie State Books, quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.
The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to
Vivian Maier.
Northern Illinois University Press
The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.
Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order
by book title.
Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.