American Behavioral History: An Introduction

3 Abduction Stories That Changed Our Lives: From Charley Ross to Modern Behavior

3 Abduction Stories That Changed Our Lives From Charley Ross to Modern Behavior Paula S. Fass When parents take their children to the local police to have them fingerprinted in response to fears about child kidnapping, they are acting in ways that stem from a long history about which most Americans are totally unaware. While few Americans today will do something so extreme as preemptive fingerprinting, most parents in this country and increasingly in Europe as well, in the beginning of the 21st century have become more and more reluctant to let their children play alone in the streets or even unattended in their own front yards. The growing restrictions placed on children’s activities and the pains that parents take to chaperone and carefully organize their children’s lives are all significant changes in contemporary behavior that are based in historical events and precedents. Ask most parents today how their children’s lives differ from their own, and they will tell you that their own childhood, thirty or forty years ago, was freer and much less hindered by parental supervision. These perceptions, the important attendant behavioral changes and their consequences for today’s generation of children, are embedded in a broad landscape of historical events as well as demographic, residential, and employment patterns. The shrinking size of the American and European family is well known, and the new prominence of mothers’ employment and suburban isolation have been widely studied and discussed at a time when “soccer moms” are a political phenomenon. These contemporary social changes are often invoked to explain growing parental anxiety, guilt, and activities aimed at shielding children from harms of many kinds. And some historians and social scientists have learned to talk about  cycles of panics—accelerating media alarms—from which parents learn to fear for their children but whose real anxieties are lodged in perceptions about changes in gender and sex norms.1 Far less attention has been paid to the specific history that not only frames contemporary parental fears about child safety generally, but which, I would argue, forms the basis for quite specific fears about child abduction. It is that history that I propose to examine in this essay since it is essential to understanding contemporary behavior and especially the pronounced tendency in our society to move away from once informal and unsupervised children’s play activities to the much more organized patterns of the present. Peter Stearns has written recently and pointedly about “anxious parents ” in the 20th-century United States who try to shield their children from pain, stress, and excessive schoolwork.2 This middle-class urge to control the details of the self and household was understood by both Max Weber and Sigmund Freud in psychological terms. In a recent New Yorker magazine piece, Margaret Talbott described it as follows: “Middle-class parents tend to be exquisitely aware of health and safety issues and often micromanage their children’s lives in order to fend off a buzzing pack of threats.”3 Stearns provides real insight into the forms these efforts have taken as well as the family developments and social and emotional changes that have accompanied this drive in the 20th century. This general anxiety about children’s welfare, and the drive to control that often accompanies it, certainly underlies the history I am eager to describe. But the origin of the specific fears about child abduction, whatever its psychological base, can be more precisely dated in time and place. Indeed, to understand the shape that general psychological drives take requires that we understand very specific historical developments. Fears about children taken away or substituted for are manifested in a wide variety of tales about fairies, elves, and changelings and date back for centuries. Anthropologists have located them in so many varied cultures that they may have some primal quality. In the West, real people such as gypsies, American Indians, or others perceived as uncivilized and marauding outsiders have also been associated with and accused at regular intervals of similar depredations. But the first historically potent modern American story about child kidnapping takes shape around a real incident . In 1874 Charley Ross was abducted from the front lawn of his family ’s house in Germantown, Pennsylvania.4 After that event, his story and parental fears about child abduction became deeply inscribed in American culture. This is the necessary beginning to our own examination. Abduction Stories  The...