Gateway to Justice: The Juvenile Court and Progressive Child Welfare in a Southern City (review)

Trost is correct: Most of the many studies about the creation and workings of the juvenile court concern the major urban centers of Progressivism—Boston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Historians have not mined other regions of the United States in their quest to explain the juvenile justice system that emerged throughout the nation during the first decades of the twentieth century. In Gateway to Justice, Trost provides a corrective to this regional centrism.

On the one hand, Trost shows in this history of child welfare in Memphis, Tennessee, during the 1910s and 1920s that Progressives in the South were tied into national child-welfare networks and that their solutions to delinquency and dependency reflected national norms. Women formed the core of child-welfare advocacy in Memphis. According to Trost, their efforts paralleled the Progressive maternalism that Muncy, Gordon, and others have identified as a central part of urban progressivism. ¹ The women of Memphis modeled their juvenile justice institutions on those established in other cities. They created a separate juvenile court, relied on probation and family intervention with institutionalization as a last resort, and tried to establish a child-guidance clinic (succeeding only briefly for two years in the 1920s).

On the other hand, Trost shows that child welfare in Memphis had several unique characteristics. In this southern city, Progressives forged a special relationship between reliance on government-sponsored institutions and dependence on private charitable organizations. The juvenile court, Trost argues, became a "gateway" to the network of private agencies and institutions that served delinquent and dependent children in Memphis. Families and welfare agents used the court to address childrearing problems. At the same time, southern racism created a problem for Progressives in Memphis that differentiated the city's work with children from the programs in other regions. The court reinforced a segregated welfare system, even though the private services available for African-American youths were far less extensive than those for white children, and government-financed services (such as probation officers) were unevenly distributed. The South was different, Trost concludes, but not completely different from other urban centers of Progressive child welfare.

Trost's study makes use of the records of the Memphis juvenile court, and she situates her research at the junction of legal and social history. Based on her sampling of the court data, she discovers that the court had two functions—handling cases of dependency and neglect and cases of delinquency—and that the race, class, and gender of those appearing before the court shaped the outcome of both types of case. She finds that the court was not an "instrument of systematic racial discrimination," although it "invested fewer personnel, less money, and less time" in black children than in its white clients (154–155).

Gateway to Justice points to the value of local studies of Progressivism that test models based on evidence from major urban centers. Localism certainly helped historians redefine the nature of political progressivism. Trost's book suggests that localism is also an important factor in the history of child welfare.