Justice for the Child: The Beginning of the Juvenile Court in Chicago

Justice for the Child: The Beginning
of the Juvenile Court in Chicago
DAVID S. TANENHAUS
To save young boys from being locked
up with “murderers, anarchists,
and hardened criminals,” a group
of Chicago politicians, lawyers, and
activists pooled their efforts to create
the nation’s first juvenile court.
In 1888, Lucy Flower, a transplanted Wisconsin
reformer whose public service dated back to the
Woman’s Relief Corps of the Civil War, declared
that Chicago needed a special “parental court” to
hear the cases of all dependent, neglected, and delinquent
children under sixteen years of age in the city. This
vision earned her the appellation “mother of the juvenile
court,” although it would take more than a decade of
concerted effort before this vision would become an
institutional reality.
The Chicago crusade that Flower led represented a
local manifestation of the transatlantic social movement
in the 1880s and 1890s to solve the problems of crime
and poverty, which were often conceived of and discussed
in similar terms. This concern with the social
lives of urban populations developed as a response to the
impact of industrialization and a sense of social crisis.
Individual responsibility no longer seemed an adequate
explanation for the existence of widespread disorder in
the modern world. Reformers redescribed crime and
poverty as social problems that required thorough investigation
and public action to resolve.
The young male and his world often became a subject
for these inquiries into “dark places.” In part, this
resulted from earlier studies like Henry Mayhew and
John Binny’s The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of
Prison Life (1862), which had revealed that “the greater
number of criminals are found between the ages of 15
and 25.” As Mayhew and Binny observed:
Reformer and social justice pioneer Lucy Flower (above), the
“mother of the juvenile court,” worked for more than a decade for
her dream to reach reality.
Opposite: Due to a dismal economy at the turn of the century, many
children lacked education, clothing, or even a home, leaving them
likely to wind up in a bridewell; police picked up most children due
to “vagrancy.”
[This period] when human beings begin to assert
themselves is the most trying time for every form of
government—whether it be parental, political, or
social; and those indomitable natures who cannot or
will not brook ruling, then become heedless of all
authority, and respect no law but their own.
Concerns about unruly teenaged boys led to intensive
study of these rebellious years, which psychologist G.
Stanley Hall christened “adolescence” in the early twentieth
century.
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The presence of boys in
bridewells (jails) also led to a
reexamination of criminal justice.
John P. Altgeld, a young
lawyer with grand political
aspirations, investigated Chicago’s
system of justice. In
Our Penal Machinery and Its
Victims (1884), he likened
it to:
a great mill which, in one way or another, supplies
its own grist, a maelstrom which draws from the
outside, and then keeps its victims moving in a
circle until swallowed in the vortex.
This Dante-esque descent made “criminals out of many
that are not naturally so,” including children, by subjecting
them to “a criminal experience.”
According to Altgeld, the journey began with an arrest:
“Stop right here, and for a moment imagine yourself
forced to submit to being handcuffed, and see what kind
of feelings will be aroused in you.” He added, “submission
to that one act of degradation prepares many a
young man for a career of crime.” Next, the offender was
taken to the police station where he would spend the
night “with the vicious of every kind,” literally, an introduction
to his future companions in crime.
After the long night ended, the accused would appear
before a police magistrate. At this stage, almost one-third
of the cases were discharged because of improper arrest.
These individuals, although now free, had still suffered
from the trauma of an arrest and a harrowing night in jail.
The magistrate fined those charged with minor infractions—typically
disorderly conduct. If they were unable to
pay the fine, they were sentenced to the House of Corrections
to work off their debt to society at the rate of twentyfive
cents per day. This could take from a week to half a
year and could devastate family members who depended
on the incarcerated individual for financial support.
Those charged with more serious crimes were bound
over. If they could not pay the bond, they stayed in jail
until the grand jury next met. This could be a few weeks
or a few months. If the grand jury issued a true bill, then
the accused began the waiting process again, this time
for his or her trial.
Children were among those who suffered from this
“criminal experience.” Altgeld revealed that in 1882, 3.5
percent of the more than 7,500 people incarcerated in
Reformers believed that pool halls (left) encouraged delinquent
behavior such as gambling, drinking, and smoking among juveniles.
Above: Illinois governor John Altgeld’s enthusiasm for court reform
paved the way for a juvenile court in Cook County.
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The 1868 Chicago Reform School’s Annual Report (above) shows
the kind of work boys performed in the school, including laboring in
the laundry, kitchen, and shoe and tailor shops.
Adelaide Groves, cofounder of Chicago’s Young Woman’s Christian
Association, shocked by the number of children in the city’s jail, sent
a flurry of letters to the editor of the Inter Ocean in protest, one of
which is seen below.
the House of Corrections were 14 years old or younger. If
one included 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds, the percentage
of imprisoned minors jumped to 8.8 percent. According
to Altgeld, the majority of these children had been
arrested for being homeless or wandering the streets.
In 1886, Adelaide Groves, a distinguished Chicagoan
who had co-founded the city’s Young Woman’s Christian
Association in 1877, decided to tour the city’s bridewell.
She was shocked to see “quite small boys confined in the
same quarters with murderers, anarchists and hardened
criminals.” Groves decided that it was her mission to
save these bridewell boys. In a letter to the editor of the
Chicago Inter Ocean, she asked her fellow citizens, “What
is to be done with these lads as they leave the jail when
their sentence there is served out?” Without some help,
she cautioned, these boys would become lost souls and a
menace to society.
The impassioned writings and lectures of individuals
such as Flower, Altgeld, and Groves helped publicize the
plight and dim futures of the children caught in the
vortex of criminal justice. It was not until the last decade
of the nineteenth century, however, that the crusade for a
children’s court really came together.
During the 1890s, the Chicago Woman’s Club was the
leading advocate for a children’s court. Flower, who
served as its president in 1890–91, worked closely with
her friend Julia Lathrop, who later became the first Chief
of the Federal Children’s Bureau, to find the political
support and legal means necessary to remove children
from the jurisdiction of the criminal courts.
Although the possibility of establishing a children’s
court in Chicago still seemed remote, Flower was
encouraged by the election of John Altgeld, a reformminded
Democrat, to the governorship in 1892. One of
his first acts was to appoint Julia Lathrop to the State
Board of Charities. Lathrop was the first woman to be so
honored and as a state commissioner she was able to
cultivate important political connections. She also distinguished
herself by visiting the jails and poorhouses of
Illinois’s 102 counties. She would draw on these experiences
to make the case for a more humane approach to
child welfare.
Flower conducted some research of her own. In 1895,
she visited Boston, her birthplace, to study its innovative
system of child welfare, especially its pioneering use of probation
in juvenile cases. After her return, Flower drafted a
plan to transfer all children’s cases from the city’s eleven
police courts to a single, higher court. This consolidation of
cases, she imagined, would assure more consistent handling
and also take ward politics out of the process. She
presented the draft to her friend S. S. Gregory, a lawyer
well-versed in constitutional law. Gregory told Flower,
much to her chagrin, that the plan was unconstitutional.
He explained that legal practice “must be uniform
8

Prison workers deliver meals to two young inmates in a turn-of-the-century Chicago jail.
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throughout the state and [that she] could not change it in
Chicago without changing it in the rest of the state.” Such
a statewide law, he told her, “seemed impossible.”
The ongoing tensions between Chicago and downstate
Illinois were probably Gregory’s main concern. It was
unlikely that rural counties would support a bill that
would change their legal procedures to accommodate
Chicago’s needs. Discouraged, but still determined,
Flower and Lathrop decided to consult Judge Harvey B.
Hurd, a skilled lawyer who was a specialist in Illinois law.
In 1869, Governor Palmer appointed Hurd to rewrite Illinois’s
general statutes, a task that took him five years.
Since that time, Hurd had periodically updated his
authorized version of the state’s laws and had also
helped to draft important pieces of legislation, such as
the 1876 Industrial Schools Act. This act laid out the
legal pathway of the emerging ideology of “the child and
the state,” which made it possible to imagine the creation
of a specialized juvenile court.
Hurd, not surprisingly, was reluctant to get involved in
what looked like a time-consuming and potentially futile
undertaking. Lathrop eventually was able to convince
him to take the matter under consideration after
describing to him the condition of the children she had
seen in the jails across the state. After struggling with the
legal knot for days, Hurd finally cut through it. His solution
was to make the legislation permissive, not obligatory,
so that it could pass constitutional muster. This
meant that a county might choose to have special hearings
for children’s cases, but would not be required
under the proposed law to do so. Thus, Cook County
could establish a children’s court without requiring any
of the other counties to follow its lead.
With a solution in hand, Flower and Lathrop realized
that a children’s bill “must not go the Legislature as a
woman’s measure,” so they would need to “get the Bar
Association to handle it.” Lathrop asked Ephraim
Banning, who served with her on the State Board of
Charities and belonged to the Chicago Bar Association,
to bring the matter before the association. At the association’s
annual meeting on October 22, 1898, Banning
introduced a resolution that called for the president of
the association, George A. Follansbee, to appoint a fivemember
committee, whose charge would be:
To investigate existing conditions relative to delinquent
and dependent children, and to cooperate
with committees of other organizations in formulating
and securing such legislation as may be necessary
to cure existing evils and bring the State of
Illinois and the City of Chicago up [to] the standard
of the leading states and cities of the union.
The resolution played to the pride of Chicagoans, who
only five years earlier had welcomed the world to the
Social reformer Julia Lathrop (above), a member of the State Board
of Charities and the first chief of the Federal Children’s Bureau,
advocated a more humane approach to child welfare.
Judge Harvey B. Hurd (below) untangled the legal knot that prevented
the establishment of a juvenile court in Cook County.
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Chicago Bar Association member
Ephraim Banning (above) introduced a
resolution that called for the appointment
of a five-member committee to examine
the possibility of a children’s court.
Before the establishment of the juvenile
court, both adults and children appeared
before judges in courtrooms such as this
one (right), c. 1890.
Columbian Exposition and shown their guests the
shining “White City” of the future. The Bar Association
adopted the resolution and named Banning, Hurd,
Edwin Burritt Smith, John W. Ella, and Merritt Starr to
serve on the investigating committee. Hurd assumed the
responsibility for drafting a constitutionally acceptable
bill. He had to act cautiously because of a suspicious private
industrial school lobby, which feared that a large
part of its income would be taken away if the state
adopted an anti-institutional approach to child welfare,
such as placing children in foster homes.
On December 10, in his downtown Chicago office,
Judge Hurd met with representatives from the city’s
social settlements, women’s clubs, charity organizations,
schools, and Bar Association to discuss how best to proceed.
John C. Newcomer, a Republican member of the
General Assembly from Chicago who had agreed to
introduce the future bill, was also in attendance.
In February, Representative Newcomer and State Senator
Selon H. Case, who was also a Chicago Republican,
introduced to the Illinois General Assembly the bill,
which was entitled “For an Act To Regulate the Treatment
and Control of Dependent, Neglected, and Delinquent
Children.” It was then referred to the Illinois House and
Senate judiciary committees.
As a concession to the industrial school lobby, the bill
explicitly stated:
Nothing in this act shall be construed to repeal any
portion of the act to aid industrial schools for girls,
the act to provide for and aid training schools for
boys, the act to establish the Illinois State Reformatory
or the act to provide for a State Home for Juvenile
Female Offenders. And in all commitments to
said institutions the acts in reference to said institutions
shall govern the same.
This provision suggested how carefully the drafters of the
bill were trying to fit a children’s court into the existing
institutional network.
The bill used permissive language to allow Cook County
to establish a special court. It stated that circuit court
judges in counties with more than five hundred thousand
people could “designate one or more of their number . . .
to hear all cases coming under this act.” These cases,
which included dependent, neglected, and delinquent
children under sixteen years of age, were to be heard in:
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A special committee of the Chicago Bar
Association advocated the establishment of
a juvenile court in this report (left).
Illinois State Rep. John C. Newcomer
(above) introduced a bill to the Illinois
General Assembly to legally establish a
juvinile court.
[A] special court room . . . designated as the juvenile
court room” and all the findings were to be kept in a
separate book known as the “Juvenile Record.”
Moreover, for convenience’s sake, the court was to
be referred to as the “Juvenile Court.”
The Juvenile Court would not be a new court, but
rather a branch of the circuit court with “original jurisdiction”
in children’s cases. Instead of treating children
like criminals, its proceedings would “conform as nearly
as may be to the practice in chancery,” except in cases
where the child was charged with a criminal offense. In
these more serious cases, the child would have “the right
to a trial by jury.” Justices of the peace and police magistrates
would also be required to transfer children’s cases
to the Juvenile Court. All children under this proposed
legislation would, thus, be treated as members of a single
class in need of assistance.
The child-savers were able to pass their bill, although
to win over the industrial school lobby they had to
accept many changes, including the removal of the
“secret” hearings clause, which called for private hearings
of children’s cases in the Juvenile Court, and all of
Section 8. Entitled “Children Not to be Kept in Poor
Houses,” Section 8 read:
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When any child dependent upon the county for
support is committed by the court to the care of an
association, to be placed in a family home, the court
may award a reasonable compensation for such services,
to be paid by the county, including necessary
expenses, provided that the compensation so
allowed shall not exceed the sum of fifty (50) dollars
in the case of any one child.
The industrial school lobby cited Section 8 as evidence
of a sinister plot. According to an unnamed but “prominent
Chicago physician” quoted in the Inter Ocean, private
associations were selling dependent children to
farmers in need of cheap laborers. The physician
explained:
Some of these “associations” make money on both
ends of [the] proposition. They are paid by the
county for “disposing” of a child and paid by the
person to whom the unfortunate child is sent, virtually
a slave.
The concern was that representatives of these private
associations would become the probation staff for the
new court. In this capacity, they would gain greater
access to state power. This would enable them to have
poor children declared “dependent” and gain custody
over them. These children would then be sold for a
handsome profit. The fifty dollar cash payments mentioned
in Section 8, the lobby cautioned, would not
only make child-slaving more profitable, but would also
legalize it.
The industrial school lobby was also able to strike out
proposed payments for foster care, which ensured that
private institutions would still play the leading role in
caring for dependent children. The power of the state to
inspect children held in private institutions was also curtailed.
Representative Dennis E. Sullivan had the bill
rewritten to prevent state officials from visiting “institutions
where children are supported by voluntary or
public charity.”
A juvenile homes hearing in County Civil Service, 1911. With the
founding of the court, for the first time children appeared in their
own courtrooms before specially-appointed juvenile judges.
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The imposing façade of the Cook County courthouse–city hall in 1888, the eventual home of the juvenile court.
The amended bill pleased its supporters, including the
Republican Chicago Tribune, which endorsed the measure,
and satisfied its critics. The Inter Ocean rejoiced
that the bill had been corrected “in nearly every particular
in accordance with the criticisms passed in [this
paper].” On March 23, the Illinois Senate passed the bill
by a 32 to 1 vote. The House, however, delayed voting on
the measure for unknown reasons. As Julia Lathrop later
recalled, “Mr. Newcomer, the legislator in charge of the
bill, became greatly alarmed.” Finally, on the last day of
the last session of the nineteenth century, the House
unanimously approved the measure.
Flower’s vision of a “parental court” for Chicago became
a reality on July 1, 1899, when the new law, the world’s
first juvenile court legislation, went into effect. On Monday
morning July 3, 1899, the Honorable Richard S. Tuthill
ushered in the modern era for juvenile justice by hearing
the case of Henry Campbell, an eleven-year-old accused by
his mother of larceny. The boy and his parents were the
first family to appear before the Juvenile Court, which
promised to revolutionize the treatment and control of the
city’s dependent, neglected, and delinquent children.
The Campbell case, which was heard in a courtroom
on the third floor of the County Building in downtown
Chicago, was a public event because the privacy provision
of the Bar Association Bill that would have limited
access to juvenile hearings had been removed to ensure
its passage. As a result, the court was packed with spectators
including reporters who described for their readers
how a misty-eyed Mrs. Campbell explained to Judge
Tuthill that her son was not “a bad boy at heart.” Henry
had been “led into trouble by others,” she said.
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The Honorable Richard S. Tuthill (left), the first judge of the juvenile
court, soon realized that he also would have to play the roles of
booster and fundraiser if he expected the court to succeed.
In this letter (below), Judge Tuthill commends Adelaide Groves for
her efforts to save children from city jails.
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Frank and Lena Campbell believed that they needed
the force of the law to discipline their son, who often
stayed away from home after misbehaving. Although the
parents had had their son arrested, they feared the consequences
of bringing the state into their lives and did
not want Henry “sent to any of the institutions.” They
informed the judge that the boy’s “grandmother who
lives at Rome, N.Y., will take him and keep him.” Tuthill
ordered that the boy be sent east because this change of
environment offered Henry a fresh opportunity to
become a productive citizen.
Henry Campbell’s case was an ideal one with which to
inaugurate this new era of juvenile justice. It revealed how
the Juvenile Court Act provided Judge Tuthill with the flexibility
he needed to determine what was in Henry’s best
interest. Before the passage of the law, Tuthill could have
sent the boy only to the State Reformatory for Juvenile
Offenders at Pontiac or to the John Worthy School, the
boys’ department of the city’s bridewell. Now the judge
did not have to treat Henry as a criminal who needed to
be punished for his action, but could focus on what Henry
needed in order to be rehabilitated.
This potential for individualized treatment of children’s
cases paved the way for investigations into what caused
juvenile delinquency. “The great primary service of the
court,” as Julia Lathrop noted, “is that it lifts up the
truth and compels us to see that wastage of human life
whose sign is the child in court.” This sad sight, what
she called “the truth made public,” appealed to her generation’s
concern for social justice and energized
reformers to discover ways to prevent children from
becoming delinquent in the first place.
Judge Tuthill concluded the opening day of the Juvenile
Court by speaking about the prevention of delinquency
to his makeshift probation staff, a collection of
privately-paid individuals and of police officers assigned
by their captains to handle juvenile cases. He instructed
them not to rush “neglected and wayward” children into
court, but rather to “confer with parents, priest, or
pastor, using every effort to set the child right without
resorting to an arrest save as a final reserve.” Children
should be brought to the Juvenile Court “only as a last
resort,” he cautioned.
The Juvenile Court Act did not, however, provide
Tuthill with the resources to put this new philosophy of
governance into practice because all the funding provisions
had been cut from the legislation. Reformers and
philanthropists helped operate and finance the Juvenile
Court during its early years. These Chicagoans desired to
make the Juvenile Court into a bastion of progressivism,
Judges often sent repeat offenders to detention facilities that featured
a labor program, such as this woodworking shop at the Board
County and City School in 1919 (right).
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in which individualized solutions to the problems of
children like Henry Campbell could be fashioned by
experts in child welfare. Their “progressive” vision for
the relationship of the child to the state was, however,
only one of many viewpoints in a diverse society. How
the progressives blended public power with private
interest would raise troubling questions about what they
intended to do with this powerful “new piece of social
machinery.”
Tuthill realized that he would have to play the roles of
booster and fundraiser as well as judge if he expected the
court to succeed. The Chicago Bar Association’s report
on the condition of the city’s delinquent and dependent
children, which came out that October, helped Tuthill’s
cause. The report praised the juvenile law, announced
that Tuthill was “an exceedingly happy selection” for the
judgeship of the court, and called for public officials and
This program (above) from a Chicago Congregational Club
meeting featured a speech by Judge Tuthill. The public’s fear of
unruly juveniles is reflected in the evening’s program title: “The
Delinquent Classes—What Shall We Do with Them: What Will
They Do with Us?”
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the press to spread the news about the benefits of the
pioneering legislation. Its conclusion quoted from a
speech delivered by Albert C. Barnes, an assistant state’s
attorney in Cook County, who declared:
[The Juvenile Court Law] unless thwarted by persistent
and unnatural forces, by niggardly means for
carrying out its provisions, or by the assaults of
those who seek to defeat rather than promote beneficial
legislation, will prove the dawn of a new era in
our criminal history, and of a brighter day for the
people of Illinois.
The implication that the Juvenile Court Act had
enhanced Illinois’s reputation became a common rhetorical
device used by supporters of the new piece of social
machinery. They would boast about how the Prairie State
pioneered this advancement in the treatment of children.
The court, much like an esteemed cultural institution,
would be displayed as a symbol of civilization and a
badge of civic pride for Chicagoans for years to come.
David S. Tanenhaus is assistant professor of history at the University
of Nevada, Las Vegas.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS | 4, CHS; 5, CHS, ICHi-
24067; 6–7, CHS, ICHi-25432; 7 top, CHS, ICHi-09402; 8
top, CHS, Chicago Reform School Annual Report, 1868; 8
bottom, CHS; 9, CHS, DN; 10 top, CHS, ICHi-20368; 10
bottom, CHS, from Origin of the Illinois Juvenile Court Law; 11
left, CHS, from Origin of the Illinois Juvenile Court Law; 11 right,
CHS; 12 left, CHS; 12 right, CHS, from Origin of the Illinois
Juvenile Court Law; 13, CHS, DN #9432; 14, CHS, ICHi-
00447; 15 top, CHS, from Origin of the Illinois Juvenile Court
Law; 15 bottom, CHS; 16–17, CHS, DN; 18 top right, CHS,
from The Delinquent Classes—Chicago Congregational Club; 18
middle and bottom, 19, CHS, Chicago and Cook County
School for Boys, From Report of Superintendent of Schools,
Sixty-Third Annual Report, 1917.
FOR FURTHER READING | This article has been
excerpted from David S. Tanenhaus’s 1997 thesis Policing the
Child: Juvenile Justice in Chicago, 1870–1925. For more information
on the “mother of the juvenile court,” see Harriet S. Farwell’s
Lucy Louisa Flower, 1837–1920: Her Contributions to
Education and Child Welfare in Chicago (Chicago: privately
printed, 1924). Sources written close to or soon after the time
of the court’s creation include: Timothy D. Hurley, Origin of the
Illinois Court Law: Juvenile Courts and What They Have Accomplished,
3d ed. (Chicago: Visitation and Aid Society, 1907); Jane
Addams, ed., The Child, the Clinic, and the Court (New York:
New Republic, Inc., 1925); Helen Jeter, The Chicago Juvenile
Court (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Children’s Bureau, 1922); and
Herbert H. Lou, Juvenile Courts in the United States (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina, 1927). Anthony Platt takes
a modern-day look back at the child welfare system in The
Child-Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University
of Chicago, 1969). For a look at the Juvenile Court in Chicago
today, try A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court
by William Ayers (Boston: Beacon, 1997).
The Chicago and Cook County School for Boys (opposite bottom) took the place of the old reform schools. In its 1917 annual report, the
school boasted that it taught its boys to “keep in a straight and narrow way.” Hard work was still seen as necessary for the boys’ discipline,
however, as exemplified by this group of boys plowing the fields (opposite middle), or in this picture that shows boys viewing the farm structures
they built (above).
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