2 - Everyone's Children: Psychiatry and Racial Liberalism in Justine Wise Polier's Courtroom, 1936–41

Summary

In her 1941 book Everyone's Children, Nobody's Child, the New York Children's Court judge Justine Wise Polier recounted the story of two children brought up on juvenile delinquency charges. After reviewing each child's psychiatric evaluation, Polier determined that Selma Martin and Daniel Johns were the victims of emotional neglect. Foster families had mistreated Selma. Abandoned by his mother, Daniel had been passed from place to place. Polier concluded that the “misbehavior of the children was directly traceable to their sense of insecurity.” Both “had never known security in their natural homes” and each needed a stable home and “psychiatric care to help solve the child's problem.” Polier presented each case as being fairly representative of the emotional torment that neglected children in her court had experienced. The decision to depict these youngsters and their psychological reactions as typical was an extraordinary move. Although Polier cited each case as an example of the average neglected child, these two children differed from most American children in one appreciable way: Daniel and Selma were black.

That a judge could produce a race-neutral psychological profile indicates that psychiatric authority and racial liberalism had already converged in New York's courts for juveniles. Two very significant historical shifts occurred. The first shift, the psychologization of crime, took hold first. By the 1920s, more and more children's court judges and staff considered juvenile delinquency a psychological problem requiring psychiatric care. Owing to this shift in perception, judges were no longer in the business of simply punishing misbehavior. When Polier arrived on the bench in 1936, children's court justices were increasingly expected to facilitate the diagnosis and treatment of the underlying emotional illness or conflict that caused children to commit crimes.

The second historical shift, racial liberalism, developed as a response to New Deal liberalism's reliance on race-neutral solutions to problems of racial inequality. During President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first two terms (1933–40), most citizens who answered to the label “liberal” believed that government had a duty to open up individual opportunities for employment and upward mobility through social engineering and universal entitlements. Liberals tended to believe that economic relief programs, safety nets, and social services could reduce racial inequality if they were available to all.