Making Us More Humane

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today’s show is about the history of domestic animals. And we’re going to take a very brief detour here for a story about a little girl, a girl named Mary Ellen Wilson.

SUSAN PEARSON: The story of Mary Ellen Wilson really begins with a woman named Etta Wheeler.

BRIAN: This is Susan Pearson, an historian at Northwestern. The story takes place in the late 19th century.

SUSAN PEARSON: The winter of 1873.

BRIAN: And this woman, Etta Wheeler, is what was called a church friendly visitor in New York City.

SUSAN PEARSON: A church friendly visitor is kind of a proto social worker.

BRIAN: She’d go around to the needy, pray with them, talk with them, sometimes bring food to them. And one day, in Hell’s Kitchen, she stops by to see a woman–

SUSAN PEARSON: Who was elderly and dying of tuberculosis, and who was confined to her apartment. And this woman, this dying woman, told Etta Wheeler that she was very disturbed, that every day, all day long, she heard through her walls the cries of a young girl who was living next door. And this elderly woman believed that be young girl was being abused.

BRIAN: So Etta Wheeler checks with some neighbors.

SUSAN PEARSON: Who confirm the story about the young girl and the cries that came through the walls.

BRIAN: And so with some corroborating stories–

SUSAN PEARSON: Etta Wheeler decided to knock on the apartment where the cries came from. And a woman opened the door. And Etta Wheeler described her as very sharp, having a sharp voice, and a mean face. And she wouldn’t allow Etta Wheeler entrance.

But Wheeler got a peek inside the apartment through the open door. And she claimed that she saw a young girl inside, who was pale and thin, wearing tattered clothes. Wheeler also claimed that she could glimpse a whip lying on the table in the kitchen, and that she saw evidence of ts use on the girl’s legs and arms, bruises and other marks of abuse. And although Wheeler was not admitted to the apartment, she felt just through this crack in the door that she had seen all that she really needed to see.

BRIAN: So Wheeler goes back to her church and tells her priest.

SUSAN PEARSON: And he said, well, there’s nothing I can do about it. Why don’t you go see the police?

BRIAN: And she goes to the police.

SUSAN PEARSON: And the police said, well, this is hearsay that you’re telling us. We can’t really do anything about it.

BRIAN: At that point, she kind of feels that she’s out of options. She goes home and she starts telling her family about this poor little girl. And somebody pipes up with, well, a strange suggestion.

SUSAN PEARSON: Her niece says, well, why not go to Mr. Bergh? Now, Mr. Bergh is the president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the ASPCA, which had been founded seven years earlier in 1866 in New York City.

And the niece says, go to Mr. Bergh, for she is a little animal, surely, referring to Mary Ellen.

BRIAN: Now, that sounded a little bizarre. But what did she have to lose? Wheeler went to Mr. Bergh. And it worked.

SUSAN PEARSON: The ASPCA gets a writ to remove Mary Ellen Wilson from her home. They bring her abusers, who turn out not to be her parents, into court. They are prosecuted. She is sent to a foster home in upstate New York. And according to all accounts, grows into a healthy young girl and a respectable woman, who marries later and has children of her own.

What’s significant about this story is not simply that the ASPCA intervenes to rescue this girl, but that members of the ASPCA decide, as a result of this case, to form a child protective society, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, an SPCC, rather than an SPCA. And this kind of movement spreads like wildfire across the late 19th century.

BRIAN: So if I could just stop you there, are you saying that there were, presumably, a number of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals before there was even that kind of protection for children?

SUSAN PEARSON: I am saying that, yes.

BRIAN: How do you explain that?

SUSAN PEARSON: Well, the family is the private sphere that is separate from the public world of work and politics and business. And what happens in that world is the business of the family. So there’s that kind of ideology about privacy that makes interfering between parents and children an extremely high hurdle to get over.

And this is, I think, reflected in how Etta Wheeler tries to go to all these different sources, people who should be able to help her, we think, but who say, well, there’s nothing I can do about that. Either that’s not my business, or I don’t have the right evidence.

But there’s no institution, as there is today, that would dedicate itself to saying, well OK, you’ve made a claim about child abuse. We’re going to check that out.

BRIAN: So to get back this connection between children abused and animals abused, how do we get these animal protection societies in the first place?

SUSAN PEARSON: So we tend to think, well, when there’s urbanization, people move to cities, they leave animals behind on the farm. That’s where animals belong. And if there are animals in the city, they’re pets.

In the 19th century city, that’s really not the case. The 19th century is crowded with and stinking of animals. There are horses and mules and dogs that are performing work. They’re all over the place.

And so, it’s no accident that the first animal protection societies are formed in urban areas. They’re not formed in rural areas where you might think people have a more direct relationship with animals. But they’re formed in reaction to these kind of very public industrial uses of animals.

BRIAN: So that it would not fall into that private sphere you referred to. It was more a matter of workplace regulations, in some way.

SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they do, technically, have the power to go into the private sphere. And that’s one of the things that’s novel about them. But most of what they focus on, really, is that public use of animals.

And I think there’s a couple different ways to explain what makes 19th century Americans think that animal protection organizations can also be child protection organizations. If you’re looking around the landscape of charitable and reform organizations in your city, the one that’s going to seem the most powerful and have the greatest ability to intervene in something private is going to be the SPCA, because it has law enforcement powers, because you will see its officers out on the streets, actively seeking out problems to solve.

And they’re willing. And they’ve announced that their willingness is based on a kind of moral philosophy which holds that even the most helpless and defenseless among us deserve protection.

But behind that, there’s, I think, a much deeper set of cultural beliefs and habits of thought that link animals and children in the mid to late 19th century. So that pet keeping has become very, very prevalent by the mid 19th century in the middle class family. There’s this idea that children can learn from keeping pets. They can learn about being benevolent, being a caretaker.

But there’s also the sense that animals and children have a special kind of emotional or affective connection, that is different from the kinds of connections that adults can have with animals or that children can have with adults. And you’ll see this in the form of stories that talk about children and their pets, and position the pets as friends that they go through life with and have adventures with. You’ll see this in the form of animals that talk in children’s literature. that doesn’t happen in books for adults. There’s this assumption that there’s this kind of shared affective space between animals and children.

So I think that contributes, as well, to people’s sense of there’s something that animals and children have in common that goes beyond just they’re both being helpless and defenseless.

BRIAN: Did these societies go their separate ways once this idea was broached formally? Did we have just distinct organizations for children and distinct organizations for animals?

SUSAN PEARSON: What’s interesting about the history of animal and child protection is that although the original Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that’s formed in New York City becomes separate from the ASPCA, in most places animal and child protection remain joined under the same institutional mantle throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century. So that by 1908, there are 354 active anti-cruelty organizations in the United States.

And the plurality of those, 185 of them, are what were called dual societies, societies that did both animal and child protection. And those very often went by the name of Humane Society. So if there’s a Humane Society in your town, there’s a good chance that it once did both animal and child protection, rather than just one or the other.

BRIAN: Do attitudes towards animals actually lead to broader change in the way we deal with humans?

SUSAN PEARSON: That’s a good question. I know that my 19th century subjects would say that they do. Well, they used to say, a man who is cruel to his beast will be cruel to his child.

And this is one of the other rationales for animal protection, which is to say that the way you treat a dependent being under your care, like an animal, is an indication of your basic moral fiber. And if you treat that being cruelly, you will go on to treat other similarly positioned beings of any species in the same way. So there’s a kind of slippery slope theory of violence, that what begins with animals will ultimately manifest itself in human society, in human relationships.

BRIAN: Susan Pearson is an historian at Northwestern University. She’s the author of the Rights of the Defenseless, Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America.