What happened to the compassionate and community-backed safety net that saved Babe Ruth? | GUEST COMMENTARY

When Babe Ruth was a child, he stole beer from his father’s saloon, joined fistfights in the schoolyard and wandered the streets. Regularly disciplined by his teachers in the classroom, he was what you might call “trouble.” All of this by the age of 6.

When he was 7, his parents gave up. They had him declared an “incorrigible” youth and then did what was obvious to parents early in the 1900s: They sent him to a reform school.

St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, just west of downtown Baltimore at 3225 Wilkens Ave., was an orphanage and a “reform” school, a place where the worst-behaving boys were sent. The Ruths, like most Americans at that time, trusted that the school would make a difference for the boy who was misbehaving — or at least keep him off the street. For the next 12 years, young George Ruth lived at St. Mary’s. But the institution did much more than keep him off the street. One Xavarien religious brother at the school became a mentor and taught him how to play baseball. The rest is history.

The safety net

Just 20 years before Babe Ruth was born, a Quaker philanthropist decided to fund an effort to improve public health. Johns Hopkins founded the university that today is one of the world’s best research hospitals. Institutions like St. Mary’s and Johns Hopkins were common at that time in American life. Some hospitals were run by nuns and priests with others managed by Presbyterians or Jews. Orphanages were often staffed by faith communities. Schools were run by American saints like Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton and Bishop John Neumann.

The safety net at that time was, to use the modern term, a private one. These efforts were funded by donors and supported by the local community. There was no welfare, Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare.

And the people trusted these local private institutions. Baltimore residents trusted Johns Hopkins because they knew the tradition of care. Mr. and Mrs. Ruth trusted St. Mary’s because they had succeeded for generations and because, for people like the Ruths, there were no other options. Lurking beneath the surface was the problem of who was left out: the poor, for sure, and racial groups — were often left without care.

Soon this would change, as the model of private institutions funded by private charitable donations started shifting, coming to a kind of close, as another model of care began pushing for a different way of doing things.

A greater role for government

By the time Babe Ruth signed his first professional baseball contract with the Baltimore Orioles (then a minor league team), the new social safety net was fully taking hold in America.

In no sector was this more true than in mental health. Over the next 75 years, private and religious funding for the safety net would dissipate as the government played a greater role in providing for the vulnerable.

A precursor to this new era of state-funded mental institutions was the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on what is now Roosevelt Island in New York City. This institution is perhaps most famous for being the subject of an exposé by the intrepid reporter Nellie Bly, one of the first women to break into the news reporting industry, and a pioneer of investigative journalism.

Bly was hired by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World to go undercover at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum by feigning insanity. She spent 10 days documenting the horrific treatment of patients at the facility before being released and publishing her story. The upheaval of the newspaper article and Bly’s subsequent book, “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” not only launched her career, but also resulted in a grand jury investigation and a dramatic increase in funding for the women’s asylum.

Another precursor to the system of government-funded mental institutions is documented in the new book “Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum.” It grapples with the rise of state-supervised mental health care through the lens of Crownsville Hospital in Anne Arundel County. Author Antonia Hylton masterfully explores all 93 years of the institution’s existence, from its humble beginnings as a small work camp to its end as a walled city housing thousands of patients.

Hylton’s work chronicling the struggle for those seeking dignity and care at Crownsville Hospital is critical. As she examines one of the few segregated asylums with surviving records, Hylton seamlessly draws on history to question the current state of America’s relationship with those needing dedicated mental healthcare.

Institutional changes

There are some good reasons why distrust of these systems was and is common, but two watershed events stand out.

In the 1960s, the book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo‘s Nest” was published and enjoyed some popularity, although its fame increased dramatically in the 1970s with the Oscar-winning movie starring Jack Nicholson. The novel by Ken Kesey made clear that administering care to those with mental health needs is a complicated subject, to say the least.

The second big watershed moment came in 1972 when a young Geraldo Rivera reported on the Willowbrook State School. A psychiatrist had tipped off Rivera about how terrible the hospital treated the patients. While some had been speaking out against the abuses at Willowbrook for many years, Rivera’s report depicted the horrors that could not be explained away. The story gained international attention, and spawned a revolution in freeing the mentally ill from institutional life.

Within a few years, laws were changed to “protect” the mentally ill. They could not be confined or have their rights limited. Today, the streets have too many homeless, including some who might be better off in a mental institution.

A complex problem

St. Mary’s School is long gone. Orphanages are nonexistent with government-funded foster care that is suboptimal. Incorrigible youth like Babe Ruth are kept in public school classrooms with little attention to meet their needs other than an alternative school or a special needs classroom. Most private hospitals are secular now and paid largely through Medicare and Medicaid.

All these years later, it’s easy to wonder if the pendulum has swung too far.

On our streets, we see homeless who are mentally ill, but unwilling to be institutionalized. At home, we see a system of foster care that has as many stories of suffering and abuse as it does successes.

People are uncomfortable with talk of orphanages and insane asylums, which today evoke imagery of Oliver Twist or Batman villains for many. But meeting the needs of the vulnerable is no fictitious problem. Before dismissing a potential solution as too complex or severe, we must consider the complexity and severity of the situation.

Who today would consider our current foster care system to be effective? Statistics show young people who are placed in foster care are significantly more likely to end up in prison or worse. Foster care success stories are far more rare. Yet, if we all acknowledge that what we are doing is not working, why are so few willing to consider the reforms that are necessary to fix it?

The private orphanages, reform schools, and asylums that remain have changed their branding to appear more palatable to modern audiences. Believe it or not, despite name changes, there are still several religious institutions where incorrigible youth can be sent when parents have reached the end of their rope. Yet, these campuses are too few. They could not possibly hope to match the scope of the problems being faced by today’s youth. But for many parents who send their children there, they are a ray of hope in an otherwise helplessly bleak situation.

There may not be a perfect solution. Yet, as we look back at the many years that our nation has grappled with the question of how to treat the most vulnerable in our society, one truth emerges: human compassion cannot be replaced.

Baltimoreans want to live in a society where troubled youth and the mentally ill are well cared for, but we write them off as “the government’s problem.” So we continue to pass that homeless person on the street, or turn a blind eye to children in need. Only when another story of abuse emerges will we give attention to their plight, though our attention will be fleeting. An elected official will promise more money or a new program, and we will all go back to our complacency.

Funding alone will not solve this crisis. We need communities that are compassionate enough to adopt a “see something, say something” philosophy when it comes to identifying those in need. We should be willing to call out the need around us and take the time to connect the vulnerable to resources that will help them thrive.

Human compassion must fuel efforts to provide sustained funding for programs that offer genuine relief for those in need. The Giving USA Foundation is the definitive resource for tracking America’s commitment to charitable funding. Its annual report for 2022, the most recent available, reveals a shocking 10.5% drop in charitable contributions when adjusted for inflation. The rate of individual giving, as opposed to corporate and bequest donations, fell at an even more stark rate of 13.4%.

Of course, there are a host of factors driving these changes, but the needs of the mentally ill do not decrease just because of fluctuations in the market.

Another area where human compassion must intervene to help the vulnerable is in providing the workforce to propel charitable initiatives forward. Dollars alone will not solve society’s problems with the underserved. The leader of any charitable initiative will tell you that finding staff and volunteers is the hardest part of the job. Even a few hours of volunteerism can make a difference, and a lifetime of volunteerism can benefit troubled youth or the mentally ill in our community forever.

There is little doubt that the solution to these problems in our communities must be a local one. Community-based care is the best way to guard against abuses and to ensure that those who are cared for are given respect, dignity, and every opportunity to reach their full potential. Restoring trust in resources for wayward youths and the mentally ill must be a priority especially where too often fully state-funded solutions, void of any religious or otherwise charitable foundation, lead the way but fall short. No amount of money will ever be able to replace the mission-driven care that only a community-based solution can provide.

To be clear, there is no silver bullet solution that will take every homeless person off the street and put every wayward young person on the path to a productive life. America has never had a perfect record of handling these tough cases.

Yet if Babe Ruth were walking the streets of Baltimore today, he would be the first to wonder what happened to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, which took him in as an incorrigible youth and connected him with the passion for baseball that defined his life and changed the game forever.