1 - up until the 1970 (or was it the 1980) census, 80% of country marked "Caucasian/White" as race on the census forms. After that is when a person could mark one or more races on the forms. Caucasian is still 60% of the population today.
2 - Before getting your bowels in an uproar, read novels written by historians about the history of NYC before the orphan trains and you will find
a. children were kicked out of the house at about age 10 and told to make their own way. Only the upper middle class and rich could afford to have children at home and not working. These kids had their own bars and gangs and whores (or at least they were kidnapped by the kids and sold to whore houses). Average age of a prostitute was 14 years in the Victorian age. A girl was marked for life when she turned to prostitution to eat, not that there were really any jobs for females at that time. Marriage was really the only way out to keep your reputation but with the state sanctioned enforcement of having babies, it only exacerbated the rise of children living on the streets.
A good novel that gets into this history is "Dream Land." The 2nd Alienist book is also another good book about the explosion of children living on the city streets. I think it is called "Black Angel" about a woman who was in charge of a orphanage.
b. No birth control, so kids having kids constantly, to where the child population exploded out of control.
c. Knowing all these kids have absolutely nobody at all to fall back on at home and city, of course, was tired of devoting so much money to taking care of the kids, along with the rich women who funded a lot of foundling homes.
Armed with this information, what would *you* do to help the kids and cut down on the crime these child gangs were committing?
Before you get all up in my grill and stuff, my mother's side of the family adopted a girl from an orphan train - she was treated as a family member, inherited along with the other kids, etc. Unfortunately, by the time I found this out and wanted to know more, everyone has passed on. In fact, my mother is the very last from her side of the family and she has forgotten everything, even though I bought her diaries, family history diaries, etc. for her to write it all down before she passed. Now, she's getting lucky to remember last year.
= new reply since forum marked as read