The Upside of Orphanages

Black swallowtail butterflies flutter up from tall grass as Richard McKenzie walks, smiling, beside an abandoned railroad track in rural North Carolina. He is white-haired and 63, but vividly recalls running with a boy’s legs beside the trains, a happy young man. Parentless, consigned to an orphanage, and happy.

“People don’t want to believe it, but I did pretty well in life because I was raised here, not in spite of it,” he says. “Was I damaged by the experience? I don’t think so, not at all.” Here is the Barium Springs Home for Children--simply “The Home” to young McKenzie and his fellow orphans in the 1950s--a place he often visits to chase the memories that have shaped his passion.

Perhaps more than anyone else in the country, McKenzie is responsible for renewed interest in institutionalizing parentless children. If that sounds cold, it’s because, McKenzie will tell you, the images most of us associate with orphanages are as anachronistic as those in Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.” Orphanages “were not the Dickensian hellholes portrayed in the movies,” he insists. “They were places where a lot of kids were protected and given another chance in life.”

To make his case, McKenzie has written a book and produced a documentary, which some public television stations around the U.S. are planning to air late this year and in 2006. When he’s not working at UC Irvine, where he is an economics professor at the Paul Merage School of Business, McKenzie is on the stump, giving speeches and appearing at pro-orphanage fund-raisers.

What makes his crusade remarkable is his persistence despite massive opposition. Federal law favors foster care and adoption for kids whose parents can’t or won’t care for them, and states are required to provide services aimed at keeping families together and returning children who are in foster care to their parents as soon as possible.

Mountains of research and most child welfare experts dispute the notion that orphanages make sense, financially or otherwise. McKenzie did conduct two surveys that support his position, but they weren’t scientific and aren’t taken seriously by the mainstream. His brother, who lived with him at Barium Springs, is no fan of orphanages and, McKenzie says, won’t talk about his time in North Carolina. There are orphanage advocates who think that some of his arguments are misguided.

The professor forges ahead anyway. He seems to enjoy going against the tide, making shocking statements to underscore subtle points--or, perhaps, to get people’s attention.

“Hugs and kisses are overrated,” he says when asked to answer one of the arguments made in defense of family-based care. He isn’t a fan of reuniting parents with the children they had badly failed. “Permanency, security and a sense of place for the child have to be elevated over family reunification.”

McKenzie’s recollection of his life at Barium Springs begins with his most disturbing memory. The story opens with the sound of someone drumming on the lid of a peach crate. Dozens of boys in dirty farm clothes answer the call at a barn where they form a procession. They are led by a greasy-haired adolescent called Animal, who had assumed the role of executioner for a mangy old collie named Lady. The dog, a favorite that had given birth to many adored puppies, is dragged along by one of the boys. Animal carries the “bump-off stick,” a 4- or 5-foot length of oak with a leather strap.

Killing sick or unwanted pets was routine at the orphanage, as it was on many farms of the day. The main difference was that here the children did the lethal work. Cats were drowned in buckets and dogs were felled with a single blow to the head. A few cruel lessons were reinforced by this process: Pets were of a lower order, real men must carry out their responsibilities no matter how distasteful, mercy requires speed and efficiency.

Lady received no mercy. When Animal struck the first blow, the dog howled and shook but did not fall. A prolonged and bloody scene ensued, with ever-weaker yelps following each subsequent strike. Even after she was down and seemed dead, the dog surprised her killer with a last cry.

Her agony would plague some of the boys into adulthood. Nevertheless, McKenzie manages to find a positive lesson in the memory: The boys learned about shame and the way violence degrades everyone it touches. This look-on-the-bright-side thinking is the product of his optimistic perspective--one that allows him to dismiss his lifelong struggle with late-night panic attacks.

But his finding good in his overall orphanage experience isn’t surprising considering the alternative he imagines: life on the streets of Raleigh. When he arrived at Barium Springs in September 1952, he was a terrified 10-year-old whose mother had committed suicide after years of drinking and fighting with his father.

In the disaster that was his young life, McKenzie had been subjected to violence, incest and so much emotional trauma that he would rock back and forth in a trancelike state to comfort himself. After they discovered their mother dead on the kitchen floor--she had left on the gas--McKenzie and his brother, who was two years older, were rejected by relatives who chose instead to put them in The Home.

Once a facility for 350 children, the number of residents at Barium Springs had been shrinking for decades, echoing the decline of orphanages nationwide. In 1952 it housed about 225 boys and girls of school age. The campus included traditional red brick dormitories, where beds were placed in groups of eight or more and a single attendant would care for dozens of kids.

The orphanage school offered the most basic education. Like all the boys, McKenzie was required to do farm work--much of Barium Springs’ food was home-grown--but also had time to wander the 1,500-acre property, which included streams and woods. At a time when A-bomb tests and the nascent Cold War made America tense and uneasy, life at isolated Barium Springs was still rooted in the land, the seasons and tradition.

The details of McKenzie’s childhood are told in his book “The Home: A Memoir of Growing Up in an Orphanage,” published by Basic Books in 1996, two years after Newt Gingrich, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives, sparked controversy by suggesting that some children whose parents were on welfare would be better off in orphanages. McKenzie had supported Gingrich in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal: “With all the current talk about ‘family values,’ critics must never forget that some families value very little.”

The journal piece and McKenzie’s book provided inspiration for people around the country. His arguments, and his personal story, have obvious appeal for those who dislike mainstream social welfare programs and appreciate what seems like a common-sense critique of supposedly fuzzy-headed child welfare experts.

In making his case, McKenzie gets more than a little help from the foster-care system, which in some states is dangerously dysfunctional, a nightmare of overwrought social workers, mercenary foster parents and an uncaring bureaucracy that often shuttles children between foster homes, where their lives may be in jeopardy, or returns them to bad parents.

Equally attractive for his audience are the values promoted at Barium Springs as McKenzie describes them: sports, education and religious faith. Not surprisingly, many orphanages have connections to churches. At least a dozen new facilities and major expansions have been pursued in recent years across the country, including in California where the Children’s Village of Sonoma County has begun building a facility on a former dairy farm in Santa Rosa. It won’t be called an orphanage; these days a residential institution for orphans is a “community” or “center” or “home.” McKenzie thinks that’s silly and never shies away from “the O word.” “I use the word strategically, because it has a little bite,” he says. “My goal is to make it a good word again. And I do hear more people using it in a positive way.” His hope is that “Homecoming: The Forgotten World of America’s Orphanages,” which McKenzie made for about $116,000 with the help of several foundations and a film crew who worked pro bono, will turn the tide. The documentary presents sepia-colored images of institutions and poignant testimony from orphans, now grown old, who express deep gratitude for their institutional upbringing. Filmed at reunions for orphanage alumni, the men and women recall warm friendships, kind caretakers and safe havens:

“I was proud of the fact I was raised in an orphanage.”

“I consider myself blessed.”

“We were ... the lucky ones that got picked to come to a place like this.”

The more than 2,500 people who participated in McKenzie’s surveys of one-time orphanage residents, which he conducted in 1995 and 2002, have similarly fond memories. And the professor likes to point out that the respondents were generally richer, better educated and more inclined to vote in elections than average Americans of the same ages and races. They suffered from what McKenzie terms “minuscule” rates of arrest and reliance on public assistance and “substantially lower” reported incidences of mental or emotional disorders, though they did report a higher-than-average rate of divorce.

McKenzie counts his own divorce in 1983 as one of the most painful points in his life. But he refuses to dwell on past hurts, a trait he shares with many fellow orphans. Even with their many broken marriages, those he surveyed put themselves much higher than other Americans on a “happiness index” commonly used in opinion research.

“As a group,” he wrote in one paper, “the respondents have outpaced their counterparts of the same racial and age group in the general population by wide margins on practically all measures, not the least of which are education, income and attitude toward life.”

McKenzie acknowledges that his survey findings might be skewed: His questionnaires went to orphanage alumni, many of whom attended orphanage reunions, and people who didn’t enjoy orphanage life wouldn’t attend reunions. But the findings are valuable, he insists, because they paint one true picture of orphanage life. And what about the research that contradicts him? He dismisses it by calling it oudated and flawed.

The shortcomings of the current strategy for caring for orphans are so apparent that “even foster-care people are looking favorably on the orphanage option,” he claims. Those who resist it, he adds, are upset “because they are losing control of the system.”

McKenzie fans abound in the pro-orphanage movement, but he does have detractors. Heidi Goldsmith, founder of the Coalition for Residential Education, a nonprofit that promotes boarding schools for at-risk children, including those in foster care, doesn’t agree with his contention that children as young as 2 who need care should be placed in institutions and left until age 18. Goldsmith believes that orphanages, which she calls “residential schools,” are fitting only for adolescents who have been failed by foster care and other children who have been neglected.

As for critics of the foster-care system, they would rather see the system fixed than discarded in favor of institutions. “We once had a lot of orphanages--and they disappeared for good reasons,” says Madelyn Freundlich, a social worker, lawyer and former policy director for Children’s Rights, a national legal group that monitors foster-care programs that serve more than half a million kids. The group has filed 11 lawsuits against state-run foster and child welfare programs, claiming neglect and frequent abuse. In eight cases, the suits resulted in court-ordered supervision of the programs.

Like McKenzie, Freundlich can recite horror stories: the children found starving in New Jersey and Texas, the 5-year-old foster child suffocated with duct tape in Maine. She, however, also believes the research that has concluded that orphanages don’t provide greater safety than foster homes, and that they can deprive youngsters of long-term, caring relationships. Although they may not get much media attention, good foster parents are found in every state, she says, and the children they raise tell stories that are every bit as hopeful as the ones in McKenzie’s book.

“What we all need is a family,” Freundlich says, “so instead of spending money to build institutions we should spend it helping families who need help to stay together, and providing the best foster care possible when they can’t. Kids just do better in families.”

That was the thinking when reformers began to dismantle the orphanage system about the time of the historic White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children in 1909. Traditional orphanages gradually disappeared. The institutions that remained evolved into much smaller schools, or became treatment centers for children with psychiatric or behavior problems.

There are just too many risks in housing children in big institutions, Freundlich says. One in particular is a dynamic she calls “problem contagion,” which can emerge in settings when large numbers of young people, many of them troubled, live together.

Problem contagion may have been at work when Animal took up the bump-off stick and led the boys of Barium Springs to execute Lady. It’s hard to imagine that without a certain social pressure, and isolation from responsible adults, so many boys could be drawn into such a grotesque ritual.

In his book, McKenzie points to the story of Lady to prove that he is presenting the whole truth about his childhood. But he pays little attention to the fact that the school where he was educated was so deficient that his vocabulary and language skills, represented by a verbal SAT score of 264, were far lower than his peers’ when he went off to nearby Pfeiffer College.

Another person might credit McKenzie’s extraordinary resilience, and not Barium Springs, for his success later in life, his doctorate from Virginia Tech, the many books he’s written, his 14 years at UC Irvine, his happy second marriage, his four children. It’s easy to imagine that if young Richard McKenzie had been raised by loving foster parents, he’d be a tireless crusader for improving supports for the foster-care system.

Instead, with his gift for argument and advocacy, McKenzie has brought justification and support for those who want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to bring to life the modern version of the old orphanage. “Richard has helped to make the very concept of children’s homes credible again,” says Ric Fouad, a former president of the alumni association at Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania who is pressing it to use its $8-billion trust to expand its children’s services.

McKenzie would like to see Barium Springs--today a treatment center for abused and neglected children--return to its original purpose. On a recent visit, he teased the home’s administrator, John Koppelmeyer, about it, asking when the transformation would take place. Koppelmeyer, a social worker by training, changed the subject, but later addressed it when McKenzie wasn’t present.

“I like Richard, and at the base we both want children to be in a healthy, safe, nurturing place,” he said. But “the best scenario for kids is living in a family setting.”

A few hundred yards from Koppelmeyer’s office, there was a huge banner facing the two-lane highway that cuts through the campus. McKenzie couldn’t have missed it. In big letters it asked: “Interested in Becoming a Foster Parent?”