Good and Everlasting Friends: Letter-Writing and Friendship in a "Boy-Saving" Reform Endeavor in Progressive-Era America, 1896 to 1906

This essay examines the familiar and intimate correspondence between poor boys from America's industrial cities (ages twelve to eighteen) who were confined to the George Junior Republic, a Progressive-Era juvenile reform program, and Thomas Mott Osborne, the organization's board chairman and wealthy benefactor. By focusing on the social act of writing letters and the relationships these acts engendered, it uncovers the dynamic interplay of interest, power, and feelings in the relationships of the boys and their patron Osborne. In doing so, the essay complicates the more familiar view of such relationships as instruments of social control. Regarding the "friendships" as the boys and Osborne believed them to be—that is, as actual friendships—reveals the intense emotional ties that bound the boys and their older and more powerful benefactor across hierarchies of age, class, and ethnicity. The letters show that friendship between the comparatively powerful and powerless was not only possible; it also tempered the inequalities of incarceration and enabled the boys to resist the more coercive instruments of uplift by declaring their right to sympathy, compassion, and love.