4 Tragic & Weirdest Ways Children Were Treated in History
A politician turned orphans into psychos to make money, use of baby cages and mass abduction.
Every human being deserves to be treated with respect, care, kindness and empathy— the bar strengthens when it especially comes to children.
Providing them with protection and love is a primarily unwritten rule mandatory for every adult. But, sadly, history had captured several instances when such basic rules of humanity were broken.
Several unfortunate moments have dotted history where weird ideas were practiced on children — while sometimes considering them as a betterment but most of the time to give punishment of one sort or the other.
Let’s dive into the lives of unfortunate being whose place you would not even imagine yourself putting in.
1. The social program that destroyed the lives of unfortunate orphans
People in the Canadian province Quebec regarded the Roman Catholic Church as an infallible authority until the mid-Twentieth century.
Poverty in the decades of the 1940s and 1950s worsened in the region. Maurice Duplessis, a devout Catholic politician, came to power in those hard times.
He handed over control of several orphanages, hospitals and schools to catholic authorities. Back then, the government incentivized health-related initiatives like the construction of hospitals more than any other social program.
Provinces got $1.25 per day for every orphan, while $2.75 for every psychiatric patient per federal contribution. He gamed the Canadian federal government’s subsidy assistance program.
Plotting an evil plan with the Church, he decided to manipulate the provinces under the assistance program. He planned to turn taxpayer dollars into the coffers of Quebec’s Roman Catholic Church — as much as he could. Upon knowing this scheme, an idea to turn orphans into psychiatric patients hit upon the evil man — as it meant $1.25-a-day transforming into $2.75-a-day.
With the help of Quebec’s Roman Catholic Church, Maurice Duplessis conspired to do such transformation of orphans. They implemented the idea by setting up a system that falsely diagnosed the orphan with a mental problem — the worst scheme they could think of siphoned more federal dollars into the church’s coffers.
They continued to misdiagnose the orphans, and sadly, it took decades until such an affair was uncovered. What was the worst? Twenty thousand orphans were labelled mentally ill, which resulted in their schooling being stopped. They were sent to mental institutions where they were poorly treated and abused.
2. Bizare history of putting babies in cages outside windows
Have you heard of putting children in the cage? This bizarre practice was adopted for the betterment of the child, but it was not.
The idea of dangling children in a cage sprouted when in 1884, Dr Luther Emmet Holt published his work on the “Care and feeding of children” through which he advocated the idea of exposing the babies to the maximum amount of air.
His work says:
Fresh air is required to renew and purify the blood, and this is just as necessary for health and growth as proper food. The appetite is improved, the digestion is better, the cheeks become red, and all signs of health are seen.
No doubt, several benefits followed with such an exposure: it toughened the babies and boosted their immune system.
Interestingly, what Dr. Holt suggested was different from what parents practiced. He simply wanted parents to lay the baby’s basket near an open window so they could inhale maximum air.
But some parents went far and beyond, including Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of future U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (D-New York). They constructed a cage outside the window in which they stuck their baby. Talking about Mrs. Roosevelt, she laid her daughter Anna in a cage in 1906.
Doctors told Eleanor Roosevelt that her newborn daughter Anna needed fresh air. Thus, she went for the construction of a box wired with sides and a top.
Laying the wooden basket into a chicken wire cage, Roosevelt placed Anna and slept all the while. The baby was terrified, shouting to be rescued from the tyranny she had been exposed to.
Interestingly, Roosevelt’s doctor had asked her to ignore if the baby cried. Thus, she naturally didn’t pay attention to her screams — poor soul.
The baby’s reaction touched the alarmed neighbors thus threatened to call The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Toward Children.
Taken aback by the neighbors’ negative reaction, Mrs. Roosevelt, who was living in the fantasy of adhering to the best childcare practice, continued the act.
Her act was criticized, but despite that, it gained popularity. Inspired by the act of Mrs. Roosevelt, in 1922, Emma Read of Spokane, Washington, filed the first patent for a baby cage.
The portable cage was designed so that it was suspended from the external edge of the windows. The cage targeted the infants residing in the apartment building who didn’t have the luxury to enjoy the backyard or gardens for exposing the child to fresh air.
Commercial cages used to then appear in different materials — mesh cages enabled the light to pass through while fancier ones had a roof that protected the infant from rain, snow and other nature’s forces.
From the 1930s, there was a rise in the purchase of such baby cages as communities and clubs like Chelsea Baby Club propagated the idea to an extreme level — making cages compulsory in the apartments.
Well, what caused the end of its usage? Towards World War Two, the fear of German rockets and bombs did. Baby cages were reintroduced after the war but weren’t as popular before before — as the world became more aware of the dangers it posed, like falling away.
3. The Nazi Kidnapping Program targeted thousands of unfortunate children
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Are you aware of the Nazi kidnapping program? During WWII, SS leader Heinrich Himmler commanded to abduct children who met the standard of “racial purity” in German-occupied lands.
Unfortunately, several thousands of children were seized from either the houses or the streets to ensure that racially valuable ones were not getting wasted by being part of inferior races.
Mainly from the USSR and Eastern Europe, the racially pure people were taken to Lebensborn homes. These children were supported to get Germanized in the Lebensborn dwellings and later put up for adoption.
This weird program was initiated in November 1939 after Germany seized Poland. Himmler was given the responsibility for controlling the conquered land, which came up with a 40-page document that read, “The Issue of the Treatment of the Population in Former Polish Territories From a Racial Point of View. ”
The document’s summary was horrifying as it ordered the expulsion of natives Poles except for those Poles who had polish children with Aryan traits. It aimed to settle the kids with ethnic German families.
While targeting the children, Himmler thought he was, in essence, saving the children from living among non-Aryans. Child kidnapping kick-started and over 400,000 unfortunate children were abducted. Targeted children were limited to ten years of age as only till this time their national identification could be altered.
Additionally, Himmler imposed an extreme plan for Polish children. He deprived them of a fundamental right — education. He deemed it was enough they know counting up to 500 and just the act of scribbling their own name — such an awful exclusion to children who, according to him, were racially impure.
4. America’s child soldiers face death with terror
An enormous number of American served as soldiers in the United States Civil War. More than 100,000 soldiers in the Union Army were children aged less than fifteen. A similar number of boys served in the Confederate Army.
Several cases surfaced where children less than eight years old were given uniforms to wear. Most of these children served the role of drummer boys and cook’s assistants, but not to forget that they were exposed to the bullets in the same way as the soldiers in combat positions during the battles — dealing with the terror of facing the firing line.
The firing line was not the only terror Civil War child soldiers faced. Captured child soldiers could be imprisoned in horrific prison camps such as Andersonville where 13,000 men died of starvation and disease. In addition, Confederate soldiers sometimes killed captured African American soldiers including child soldiers in cold blood to punish ex-slaves for serving in the Union Army.
As far as the US Navy was concerned, then children took the role of powder monkeys. They were tasked with delivering gunpowder from magazines to the canons, getting exposed to the same danger as any sailor was — perhaps they were at greater risk compared to the rest of the crew members.
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References used in the article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_children_by_Nazi_Germany