The importance of children for national projects has been identified in most classical studies of nationalism. The role with which the spread of schooling and literacy for the diffusion of nation-related values was endowed (Anderson 1991; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1992) made the younger generations a focus of historical analysis. Accordingly, the classical top-down perspective has led scholarly investigation through the analysis of formal education and formal education practices, as well as the national élite’s struggle to improve children’s life conditions and diminish mortality in the framework of nation-building and industrialization processes (Humphries 2010; Viazzo and Corsini 1997). Over the last decades, however, child studies have considerably widened the field of research. While state agency has been increasingly explored as a force that tends to define policies towards future citizens by means of informal practices (Saxton 2012, 103–104), children have eventually been understood as having their own voices, needs, and, ultimately, agency (Stargardt 1998; Venken 2011, 2015, 2017).
Regardless of the symbolic and practical centrality of new generations, however, children have rarely been looked at as an object of national contention. In her groundbreaking study on the Bohemian lands, Tara Zahra (2008) argued that in Central Europe, nationalist activists often engaged in battles for influence over the upbringing and care of children and the language in which they would be educated. Zahra maintains that these efforts were intended to fight the national indifference and ambiguous national loyalties of large strata towards the local population. Machteld Venken (2017, 11–42) has emphasized the importance of merging border and child studies. Venken claims that, beginning with the demise of multinational empires at the end of World War I and continuing with territorial changes at the end of World War II, the shift of state borders prompted the adoption of particular child acculturation practices for newly acquired regions. Both in border regions and in areas characterized by national indifference, child acculturation practices exposed fundamental conflicts. Promoters of acculturation practices acted as heralds of national homogeneity, even if they often relied on regionalism as a bridging concept. Their practices, however, were often contested by one or more groups pursuing similar goals. In turn, children were not the passive recipients of disseminated messages. Even if national categories came to be introduced into children’s lives by force, in many cases their agency remained the key point causing the failure or success of acculturation practices (Kamusella 2009). In this regard, their fate remained in line with the interpenetration of hybridity and homogeneity by which border region discourse is usually characterized (Ballinger 2004).
Within this context of national contention, the interconnections among children, poverty, assistance, and acculturation have not been extensively analyzed as a separate problem. Michel Foucault (2003, 53) stated that poverty and the poor cannot simply be considered a social category, but are a part of a series of discourses that define a certain socioeconomic condition and give rise to their otherizing. More precisely, within the framework of discourse, poverty and the poor are constructed as an image of the break-up of social norms accepted as the customary and moral basis of dominant groups.
Literature on orphans and abandoned children, who represent the core of the infant destitution phenomenon, has continually tackled the issue of child assistance as a matter of social order. From early modern times, the institutionalization of care for abandoned children throughout Europe meant the involvement of the state as the principal disciplining actor with adequate tools for education and/or control (Cunningham 1991; Murdoch 2006; Polenghi 2003; Reggiani 2011). From the Enlightenment, disciplining actions have been accompanied by pivotal moralizing projects in which children cared for in orphanages were mostly seen as raw material for the shaping of new citizens (Ransel 1988). Ideology has represented a leading motive governing the development of social assistance policy design (Ball 1994; Caroli 2004; Kelly 2007). Moralization goals also led international humanitarian interventions after the world wars. Avoiding the social radicalization of indigent children and supporting their development as bearers of liberal values were the foremost goals of the international humanitarian actors that intervened in early post-war Europe (Cabanes 2014; Irwin 2013; Kind-Kovács 2016; Smirnova 2010).
In twentieth-century nationalizing societies and, especially, in areas contested by two or more nationalist élites, the supposed moral “instability” of orphans and destitute children was observed with particular concern. At least since the Enlightenment, children have been envisaged as the image of the nation’s future. If destitute children’s moral attitude was a priori met with typical anxiety related to the possible risks to public order, their conduct was looked with particular apprehension as symbolically and practically endangering the development of the national community. Nick Baron (2017, 2) recently highlighted these worries with reference to Eastern Europe and Russia in the first half of the twentieth century:
States of the region implementing visions of radical social change regarded “their” children not just as national property to be preserved and protected, but as a means of securing a better future. Children in these states became objects and instruments of extensive programmes of social engineering, which often also entailed their forcible displacement. For those children, ideals of a “happy childhood” under benign state tutelage […] all too often contrasted with the hardships of homelessness and life on the street […] or the harsh reality of state institutions. Children “out of place” became the focus of ever greater anxiety and alarm on the part of adults, who viewed them as both a symbolic injury and physical loss to the nation. […] But children “out of place” were also seen as instigators of social disorder and emblems of degeneration. Children were in danger and were dangerous.
Destitute children were looked at by national élites as a potential point of degeneration for the whole nation that from a moral, economic, and even biological standpoint it was necessary to neutralize (Baron 2017, 7). Many questions, however, remain unanswered. The scholarly literature has stressed that, compared to Western Europe, the involvement of state authorities in social assistance activities in East Central Europe was belated (Brandes and Marx-Jaskulski 2008; Petrungaro 2019, 143). Did similar logic influence destitute child assistance? What relations existed between civil society involved in child social assistance and state power? Did the involvement of civil society in destitute child assistance entail concurrence among actors on a national/social basis? Were destitute children subject to specific “reshaping” and on what basis? How did functions of social assistance integrate functions of social control? And, last but not least, did the fall of multinational empires in the late 1910s radically modify destitute child assistance and its meanings?
In the present short monograph, I will focus, though not exclusively, on a particular sub-category of destitute children—institutionalized orphans and abandoned and poor children within the territory where the Lithuanian national movement developed in the late nineteenth century and the independent Lithuanian state emerged at the end of World War I. In particular, I will concentrate on how the orphan and child care system interacted with the Lithuanian nation-building project and how the emergence of the Lithuanian nation state changed its functions, goals, and practices. Due to this specific choice, most attention will be paid to the friction between and strategies adopted by Lithuanian actors. While the Lithuanian national movement developed in constant tension with/in opposition to the development of modern Polish national identities, Polish social assistance actors will also be considered. Jewish assistance, which in those years experienced an equal expansion but did not lead to direct ideological clashes for nation-building reasons, will not be taken into account. Due to its specific development trajectory, the Klaipėda region will remain beyond the goals of this study as well.
The trajectory of Lithuanian nationalism, where by “nationalism” I mean the cluster of practices and discourses through which the sense of solidarity among the nation’s members has been organized and triggered, recalls the importance of social policies in a context still characterized in the 1910s by diffused national indifference (Zahra 2010). At the early stage of its mass development in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Lithuanian national movement repre...