“When Is a School Not a School?” Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith, Child Prisons, and the Limits of Reform in Progressive Era Texas

Abstract

This archival study explores the life and work of Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith (1885–1942), a Progressive Era social worker and prison warden. Specifically, I explore the first phase of her career as a House Physician at the Virginia K. Johnson Home in Dallas, Texas (1911–1915) and as the first Superintendent of the Texas State Training School for Girls in Gainesville, Texas (1916–1925). Using archival research, I detail three conflicts that defined Dr. Smith’s superintendency: her fight to reclassify a youth prison as a school, her challenges to a Ku Klux Klan-dominated legislature, and her refusal to cede authority to a State Board of Control. Together, these conflicts led the Board to terminate Dr. Smith’s position, an outcome that would replay twice more before she retired from prisonwork. I argue that when most reformers made significant concessions, compromising their visions to maintain state funding and political allyship, Dr. Smith stood out for her record of refusal. And yet, like other reformers, she left Texas with the capacity to imprison more women and girls than ever before.

1. Introduction

Physician and completely discredited social worker in the field of juvenile delinquency. Dubbed an impractical dreamer and theorist. Unable to get any job in my field, so–am running a book shop at 1711 H Street N.W.1

Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith wrote this biographical sketch, published alongside an announcement of her death in the Evening Star on 23 May 1942. Between 1916 and 1937, she was simultaneously hailed as one of the most progressive juvenile reformatory leaders in the United States and terminated from her role as superintendent of three separate prisons. Who was Carrie Weaver Smith? What does her legacy mean for social workers struggling in and outside of the juvenile legal system today?

When social work, as a discipline, recalls its history with the criminal legal system, it often invokes progress narratives about the juvenile court and the associated child-saving movement (Platt 2009). More opaque is social work’s complex history with the US prison system. The Progressive Era was defined, in part, by social workers’ insistence that the State—not the church, the women’s club, or a private charity—had a responsibility to provide “care”. Many progressive reformers—White, middle-class women, in particular—aligned themselves with state governments to design, build, and administer new custodial institutions.

These new institutions, particularly those built to confine women and children, allowed mostly White, middle-class women to leave or never fully commit to the domestic sphere. They became social researchers, caseworkers, investigators, field workers, home visitors, and superintendents. This last role, the superintendent, is easy to gloss over. Many readers may imagine a person tasked with overseeing a school district. But for centuries, the title superintendent has been used by administrators of many custodial institutions, including asylums, hospitals, and prisons. While the leaders of men’s prisons were sometimes called “wardens”, recognized as penal today, leaders of women’s and children’s prisons were almost exclusively called superintendents. With this in mind, I argue we should recognize social workers as some of the earliest wardens of women and youth prisons in the United States.

Social worker–prison wardens believed they were doing something different that they were changing the contours of or repurposing the prison. Their work came on the heels of the juvenile court movement. To imprison large numbers of women and children, reformers first needed the infrastructure to sentence them. In his groundbreaking 1969 book, The Child Savers, Anthony Platt argued that in the end, juvenile court reformers supported massive expansions in carceral infrastructure, over which they had little control. By the mid-twentieth century, the US was left with an unprecedented number of courts, prisons, and other custodial institutions. Social workers’ dreams of using holistic medical and educational interventions to save (certain) children from their biology, family, or society were too expensive. States increasingly prioritized punishment and efficiency, especially as prison populations exploded and became increasingly Black and brown.

Today, well-meaning reformers across the country have renamed juvenile correctional facilities “Children’s Centers”, “Schools”, and “Youth Camps” and put them under the jurisdiction of state departments of child welfare or youth and family services. Failing to challenge logics of criminalization and rehabilitation, they have advocated for a return to the Progressive Era’s protective roots (Reardon 2019, para. 1). In A Violent History of Benevolence, Chapman and Withers (2019) trouble the ideology or project of rehabilitation. They argue that rehabilitation is bound up with eugenics, the two working as “compatible and complementary practices of normalization and violence” (p. 240). Taking for granted the gendered, classed, and racialized boundaries of (ab)normality, social workers and social scientists have, for more than a century, deployed pathologizing and paternalizing interventions on institutionalized persons. With modern methods (e.g., trauma-informed care, cognitive behavioral therapy) and professionally trained staff (e.g., social workers, psychologists), the story goes, the system and the youth trapped within it can be saved. We have been here before.

In this paper, I share a cautionary tale of one Progressive Era social worker intent on reimagining the prison. Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith spent over two decades leading prisons for women and girls across three states. Her reputation as a progressive social worker–prison warden began with her appointment as the inaugural superintendent of the Texas State Training School for Girls. This archival study seeks to expand our understanding of social work’s relationship to and role in constructing the US carceral state and invites us to question the limits of reform and the (im)possibilities of standing for humanity in a fundamentally inhumane system. To situate Dr. Smith’s work in the Progressive Era, I discuss social work’s relationship with the training school, competing theories of delinquency, and the characteristics of so-called progressive prisons and their wardens.

1.1. The Social Worker and the Training School

However euphemistic the title, a ‘receiving home’ or an ‘industrial school’ for juveniles is an institution of confinement in which the child is incarcerated.

—Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas (1967), in re: Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 27

Juvenile prison reform was central to US social work’s professional formation. Social work’s earliest national organization, the National Conference of Charities and Correction (NCCC), was an essential site of organizing and knowledge sharing for prison and court reformers. Some of the nation’s most influential prison reformers, such as Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Frederick Howard Wines, Enoch Wines, Hastings H. Hart, and Zebulon Reed Brockway, were early founders and executive members of both the NCCC and the American Prison Association (Chaiklin 2005; Hansan 2012; McKelvey 1977; Rafter 2009).

At the 1904 NCCC, child prison administrators established the National Conference on the Education of Truant, Backward, Dependent, and Delinquent Children (“NCET”) (Mennel 1973). Facing pushback from a professionalizing social work field starting to distinguish itself from correctional work, the NCET moved to the National Probation Association in 1911 (Shumate 2003). A decade later, the NCET renamed itself the National Conference of Juvenile Agencies (NCJA) and moved homes again, this time to the American Prison Association (American Prison Association 1921; Mennel 1973; Shumate 2003). In 1936, half of the NCJA left to form the National Association of Training Schools (NATS) and return to the NCCC (Mennel 1973; Rosenthal 1987; Shumate 2003).2

While this history of shifting names and host organizations may seem mundane, the NATS’ journey reflects an identity crisis that has plagued juvenile prison reformers for over a century. Is the juvenile prison a penal, educational, or welfare project? This unresolved question has created a legacy of unstable discourses used to describe child prisons and their administrators and to obscure the role of social work in an evolving carceral state. The proliferation of progressive approaches to corrections in the early 20th century coincided with a progressive education movement that emphasized experiential, child-centered learning. Platt (2009) argued that “penal reformers exploited the rhetoric of the new education to give respectability and legitimacy to programs of agricultural and industrial training in reformatories” (p. 59). How did we get here?

1.1.1. Competing Theories of Delinquency

Some social workers championed the now infamous theory of eugenics, or the idea that delinquent women reproduced delinquent children. Eugenicists defined people as desirable or undesirable and used penal technologies to control procreation accordingly (Harm 1992). Eugenic criminology posited that biology and heredity could explain delinquency. The woman criminal was more dangerous than her male counterpart because she could corrupt men and breed future criminals (Freedman 1974). Eugenicists spent decades collecting pseudoscientific data from imprisoned women and girls, desperately trying to defend claims that so-called “feeblemindedness” caused criminality (Leotti 2022). Governments and civic organizations employed social workers to identify, police, and detain “undesirable” persons (Abrams and Curran 2000; Harm 1992; A. C. Kennedy 2008).

Feeblemindedness became a proxy for anyone deemed undesirable, including sexually active girls, unmarried women, queer people, sex workers, women of color, and disabled people. Because feeblemindedness threatened the social order, reformers argued, it justified indefinite confinement and involuntary sterilization (Harm 1992). White reformatory leaders understood Black women and children as inherently more criminal and less rehabilitable, no doubt influenced by the popular pseudoscience of phrenology. While White and European women and children were siphoned out of the penitentiary system, Black women and children, particularly in Southern states, remained in racially segregated adult jails (Brice 2007).

Other social workers adopted environmentalism, or the theory that environmental conditions produced delinquency. Crime was no longer a representation of sin but a consequence of corrupt and unstable environments (Rothman 1971). The “native-born” young White woman was being corrupted by a rapidly changing culture that glorified consumerism, public recreation, and increasingly, female independence; a home environment plagued by alcoholism, divorce, premature death, or abuse; a work environment characterized by exploitation and proximity to men (and consequently, sexual abuse); and an unprecedented number of opportunities to engage with people across gender, race, and class lines. Reformers worked to carve out a new stage of life—childhood—for White and European American non-feebleminded youth, understood as malleable, rehabilitable, and less culpable for crime. If one’s environment caused delinquency, reformers reasoned, removing them from their families and social worlds was the only cure.

Many social workers attempted to practice and teach at the intersection of biological and environmental theories. While having different starting places, they shared the same intervention: detention. The purpose and length of that detention varied dramatically. A strictly eugenicist reformer viewed detention as necessarily indefinite, or at least mandatory until a woman was sterilized or past “child-bearing” age. A strictly environmentalist reformer viewed detention as an opportunity for reformative instruction in a controlled environment, and thus temporary. But what if you believed criminal tendencies could be caused by either?

Enter classification, a process of pseudoscientifically examining and diagnosing delinquents to assign them differential “treatment”. Brenzel (1983) argued this process was essential to “the development of an ‘institutional state’: mental hospitals, insane asylums, and jails, a network intended both to treat and to redeem those judged to be in need of rehabilitation” (p. 24).

Reformers used eugenicist innovations such as intelligence tests to re-route allegedly feebleminded women into asylums and other custodial institutions intended for indefinite detention. Youth formerly institutionalized together in local institutions were now distributed across specialized institutions, theoretically separating the abused and neglected, the feebleminded, and the criminal. In reality, these lines were malleable and political. Black women were often excluded completely from reformers’ innovations. For example, in 1923, Black women accounted for just 9.6% of US women, and 39.1% of US women in prison (Lekkerkerker 1931). Theories of racial inferiority posited that Black women were beyond reformation—never allowed to claim the womanhood White reformers were so desperate to save (Brice 2007; Dodge 2005). More “progressive” reformers employed racially paternalistic arguments, suggesting Black, Indigenous, and some immigrant women needed time to assimilate to a superior “American” culture. Some named enslavement, colonization, racism, and xenophobia—most often situated in the past—as barriers to assimilation. Few questioned the construction of criminality itself.

For those who could be reformed, whose womanhood could be “saved”, the reformers had an ambitious plan. “The girl problem” would no longer be the purview of locally run private, sectarian homes (Brenzel 1983). To truly attend to this crisis, the public would have to understand the delinquent girl as their problem, and replace this ad hoc system with state-run institutions using scientific methods and employing specially trained workers. Workers would be women, who social feminists believed were uniquely positioned to understand the plight of and reform their “fallen” peers. These women, presumed White, middle class, and Christian, would become protectors or “keepers”—protecting women from abuse in male-dominated institutions, men from women’s evil temptations, and society from future generations of criminals (Freedman 1974). This scale of state investment was no easy sell. But within just a few decades, with the help of women’s organizations, women’s suffrage, and emergency wartime measures, reformers blanketed the country in progressive prisons for women and girls (Freedman 1981; Reeves 1929). So, what exactly made a prison progressive?

1.1.2. The Progressive Prison

Progressive Era prisons for women and children reflected a new penology, characterized by indeterminate sentences and the alleged replication of an ideal home. Specialized courts, void of due process, adjudicated women for an array of new crimes designed to control moral behavior, and youth for status offenses or transgressions that applied exclusively to minors (Sheldon 2005). Women and girls were overwhelmingly criminalized for sex-related offenses, e.g., queerness, premarital sex, masturbation, and sexual victimization (Odem and Schlossman 1991). Imposing impossible, Puritan standards of behavior, Rafter (1985) argues, these new prisons became filled with women and girls convicted of low-level moral and status offenses, while men’s prisons were reserved for those convicted of more serious, felony offenses.

Reformation could not be rushed. Individualized moral training required time and deference to the expertise of a new professional class of women. Thus, states began to adopt the indeterminate sentence. Rather than judges and juries delivering a sentence theoretically proportional to an offense, institutions would now hold minors until they reached the “age of majority” and adult women for at least three years.3 True sentencing power would be transferred from the judge to the prison administrator (Puzaukas and Morrow 2018). These administrators or keepers, the theory went, knew better than anyone whether a prisoner was rehabilitated enough to re-enter society.

The progressive prison required a new architecture. If reformers were training women and girls to understand the appropriate boundaries of womanhood, they would need prisons that resembled women’s appropriate place—the home. The progressive prison would diverge from popular penal designs of the 19th century: the “Pennsylvania Model”, which held prisoners isolated in solitary confinement, and the “Auburn Model”, which forced prisoners to work and eat together in silence (Davies 2005a, 2005b; Rafter 1985). Reformers found an answer in the cottage plan. A model borrowed from France by the Massachusetts Industrial School (Reeves 1929), the cottage plan housed prisoners in small units (“cottages”), a radical departure from the single or multicell, gender-segregated annexes, wings, or units of traditional penitentiaries (Dodge 2005). They allowed for continued classification and segregation, dividing prisoners into cottages according to demographics (e.g., race, age), health (e.g., venereal disease, pregnancy), and behavior. Some cottages even had kitchen and dining facilities to replicate the home.

Most reformers initially refused to build fences or perimeter walls around their institutions, hoping to further differentiate the progressive prison from the archaic penitentiary. Women and girls, they believed, were “too passive to attempt escapes, impressionable and therefore in need of gentle discipline” (Rafter 1985, p. 236). In place of physical barriers, the progressive prison positioned matrons in cottages, increasing the scope and intimacy of prison surveillance. To further discourage escape, reformers scouted the countryside. Rural settings, they argued, made escape less appealing and protected women and girls from the temptations of the city (Platt 2009).

The progressive prison was expensive. Reformers demanded appropriations that were, at least on a per capita (prisoner) basis, unprecedentedly high. The cottage plan required more space, personnel, and supplies than the congregate plan (Rafter 1985). In most cases, state appropriations and women’s club fundraisers could not sufficiently support reformers’ dreams. Throughout its short history, the progressive prison was plagued with overcrowding, staff shortages, and dangerously constructed facilities. To lower costs, many prisons resorted to (child) prisoner labor, marketed as industrial training to build character and transferable skills (Willingham 2003). This was especially true for racially integrated prisons and prisons for Black women and children. The former, concentrated in the North, were significantly less funded than prisons for White women and children; and the latter were excluded from state funding altogether, relying on the help of Black churches and women’s clubs (Brice 2011; Jones 2018; Peebles-Wilkins 1989; Ward 2012; Young and Reviere 2015).

If social workers today study only official records and writings from prison administrators—by far the most accessible materials in the archives—they risk believing the progressive prison was a humane and necessarily gender-specific alternative to the penitentiary. But as historians Nicole Hahn Rafter (1985) and Anthony Platt (2009) so beautifully illustrate, they could not be alternatives because, before their invention, extremely few women and children were held in prisons and jails to begin with. The progressive prison facilitated new pathways to long-term and sometimes indefinite incarceration for women and children. At the center of the progressive prison was the warden.

1.1.3. The Progressive Warden

The girls’ training school warden (“Superintendent”), often given sole decision-making power of hiring and parole decisions, had to be a woman. Rather than rejecting the idea of prison itself, women superintendents sought to improve the technologies of imprisonment, becoming what Estelle Freedman (1981) termed “keepers in their own prisons” (p. 2). As the progressive prison predated most professional social work training, some of the first women administrators had informal training coupled with impossible demands. In her study of 30 training schools and reformatories, Van Waters (1922) observed the following:

The superintendent’s problem often demands that she be an expert business administrator, capable of handling hundreds of thousands of dollars. She must be something of a farmer, builder, architect, mother, teacher, housekeeper, stock-breeder, engineer, landscape gardener, psychologist, psychiatrist and domestic economist. Above all, her temperament must be even, balanced, creative.

(pp. 363–64)

Over time, reformers would argue that specialized prisons required specialized skills. As social work professionalized, states sought college-educated White women for administrative, psychiatric, and matron positions (although they seldom paid enough to retain them). In the early 20th century, one such woman was Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith.

2. Materials and Methods

How and why did Dr. Smith become the focus of this inquiry? Several years ago, I came across the names of Progressive Era training school superintendents in NCCC proceedings. I paused. I knew social work was instrumental in developing the US juvenile court, but I had never read about the field’s influence on juvenile prisons. I wondered: Did these superintendents consider themselves wardens? Social workers? Teachers? I conducted a preliminary review of three superintendents identified as progressive “social workers” in their time: Martha P. Falconer, Janie Porter Barrett, and Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith. Of the three women, Dr. Smith was the least covered in the academic literature, despite having an influential and tumultuous career spanning three states. Her contemporaries offered her methods and philosophies as exemplars of an emerging progressive penology. As a scholar firmly rooted in the prison abolition movement, I was eager to understand what distinguished Dr. Smith from other Progressive Era prison reformers, and thus to understand what made a juvenile prison warden progressive. This became the focus of one of my three dissertation papers (Harrell 2024).4

I decided to make sense of and make visible the roles social work played in Progressive Era youth prisons through a biographical approach. How we choose to understand the past is always a matter of give and take. A biographical approach to storytelling can humanize historical events and processes, as well as illustrate complexities and contradictions in decision-making. At the same time, over-emphasizing the theories and motivations of nationally recognized or authoritative individuals can obscure the role of the state and the influence of local leaders and institutions that shape practice (Ladd-Taylor 2017). This risk is real. Critical theories and frameworks like the medical, prison, and nonprofit industrial complexes demand we recognize the vast array of people, states, organizations, and corporations invested in systems of oppression. Anything short guarantees disappointment and defeat.

At the same time, I believe personal stories help us resist abstraction as we can examine individual agency or the ways individual social workers navigated and responded to their historical events and circumstances. The more we can recognize past social workers as complex individuals working with the ideas and politics of their social locations and times, the more we can challenge our own “claims to innocence” or strategies of positioning ourselves as less responsible for or capable of oppression (Chapman and Withers 2019).

To make sense of Dr. Smith’s life and work, in all its complexity, I explored peer-reviewed and gray literature. Few texts discuss Dr. Smith’s life and work. In Who Gets a Childhood?, William Bush (2010) briefly profiled her progressive approach to prisonwork, arguing that her departure from the Texas State Training School for Girls marked a regressive turn in the state’s juvenile prison reform movement. Writing for Boundary Stones, Ben Miller (2021) discussed the controversies surrounding her final superintendency in Washington, D.C. And most recently, Moisés Acuña-Gurrola’s (2022) dissertation described some of the philosophies that set Dr. Smith apart from other reformers. With limited secondary sources available, I turned to the archives.

2.1. Materials

My archival research began in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Quarantine, and later financial restrictions, required me to request interlibrary loans and low-resolution scans in lieu of visits to physical archives. In this way, I accessed primary source materials from Temple University Library’s Urban Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, the Stanford Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Brown University’s John Hay Library, the University of Texas at Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History, Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, and the Southern Methodist University’s Bridwell Library.5 I reviewed conference proceedings, articles, and other administrative documents through three open-access resources: the HathiTrust Digital Library, the National Archives Digital Catalog, and the Internet Archive. I combed through thousands of newspaper articles from online repositories. The Texas State Historical Society’s Handbook for Texas, an open-access, digital encyclopedia, was an invaluable resource. And two federal surveys of women’s and girls’ prisons, authored by social workers Miriam Van Waters (1922) and Margaret Reeves (1929), offered first-hand observations of Dr. Smith’s leadership and philosophies.

Finally, in the fall of 2022, I contacted Dr. Smith’s great-grandnephew, Lee Anderson, through Ancestry.com. Anderson generously shared details about his family’s history, helping me corroborate and supplement biographical and genealogical claims. Anderson also shared a scanned letter, yellowed and brittle, from Dr. Smith’s sister, writing to inform their brother of her passing. In January 2024, Anderson connected me with his cousin, Caroline (Cary) Hemphill. While Hemphill, like Anderson, did not have specific memories of Dr. Smith, she shared details about her broader family history and shared in my joy of genealogical research.

2.2. Methods

When I first decided to pursue archival research, I began reading exemplars in social welfare journals. I noticed a curious pattern. Even when publishing in my discipline—social work, which purportedly champions accessible and pragmatic scholarship—historians rarely described their methodological and analytic decisions. As a first-generation scholar outside the history discipline, I was perplexed. How did these brilliant authors locate their sources? Weigh their significance? Ascertain their reliability? Construct cohesive narratives? Form arguments?

To deduce common approaches to archival research, I engaged three strategies. First, I met with social welfare historians from whom I learned about different approaches to finding and organizing data, and confirmed that many publishers accept extremely brief or non-existent method descriptions. Second, I read and discussed methodological texts on archival research, oral history, and historiography with a social work scholar experienced in archival research. Many texts were intended for archivists constructing archives rather than the scholars using them. Nevertheless, they provided critical insights into the politics and decisions behind what is preserved, how, and why. Finally, I met with librarians and completed open-access courses through the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research to learn about building and using databases, navigating copyright law, and describing data.

I took an inductive approach to searching digital repositories, reviewing all results for “Carrie Weaver Smith”, the “Texas State Training School for Girls”, and their many variations. Together, these searches yielded thousands of sources, hundreds of which helped me construct an understanding of Dr. Smith’s work. I used Google Sheets to organize interlibrary loans, digital scan requests, and digitized newspaper searches and yields. I used Zotero, an open-access reference management tool, to store bibliographic data, document scans, and analytic memos. Along the way, I uploaded copies of primary sources to a Google Drive folder for Dr. Smith’s descendants to reference throughout our conversations.

Newspaper articles helped me corroborate key details, identify people associated with organizations and events, and access excerpts of Dr. Smith’s speeches, press statements, and public testimonies. As John Tosh (2015) writes in The Pursuit of History, primary sources are not, by definition, reliable or unbiased. Historians are interested in what people thought and felt was happening in their time, and they work to discern reliability by reading sources in their context, analyzing author perspectives and motivations, and working to gain a broad understanding of their subject. For example, newspapers in this study sometimes confused Gainesville, home to the Texas Training School for Girls, with Gatesville, home to the Texas Training School for Boys. Thus, I sometimes had to use the context and corroborating sources to ascertain which institution a newspaper was reporting on.

At the same time, newspapers were prone to sensationalist writing, speculative claims, and partisan news coverage. Where possible, I tried to triangulate newspaper reports with multiple sources, knowing that even direct quotations were sometimes misrepresented. Authors of historical research sometimes choose not to cite every newspaper article they consult. This moderation may be for any number of reasons such as having more authoritative sources (Tosh 2015), avoiding a cumbersome citation process, or considering information garnered from newspapers to be common knowledge (Carr 1961; Rampolla 2012). Disciplinary norms allow historians to be imprecise in their citation practices, particularly with digitized sources (Milligan 2022). To increase trustworthiness and encourage future scholars to explore digitized newspapers, I cited all articles I consulted. Regretfully, I did not record each source’s repository (e.g., Newspaper.com, Chronicling America).

To make sense of my data, I first built a running document with headings for each phase of Dr. Smith’s career (e.g., 1910–1915 Virginia K. Johnson Home and Training School, 1916–1925 Texas State Training School for Girls). Under each chronological heading, I documented local and state developments for the respective time and place and created thematic subheadings (e.g., Girl Scouts, House Investigation, Juvenile Court Abolition). I kept genealogical notes and photos in appendices.

As I processed and organized materials in Zotero, I added narrative notes and corresponding citations to the running document. Different font colors, highlights, and comments denoted emerging themes, insights, and questions. Alongside narrative notes, I built a running posthumous curriculum vitae (CV) to track Dr. Smith’s education, employment, memberships, publications, and presentations. This CV proved to be an invaluable resource, allowing me to efficiently cross-reference Dr. Smith’s time, place, and associations.

In August 2022, I presented my preliminary findings at the American Historical Association—Pacific Coast Branch Annual Meeting. Scholars familiar with Progressive Era archives provided generous feedback, encouraging me to limit my geographic scope to better contextualize my data in their respective time and place. Another presenter suggested I explore potential connections between the Texas Ku Klux Klan’s political dominance and state institution management in the 1920s. With these insights, I decided to focus my first study on Dr. Smith’s career in Texas.

2.3. Terms

To locate primary sources, archival researchers have to be familiar with the varied and shifting vocabulary of their time of study. So many words we use today to talk about our past are scarcely found in the archives. Searching for “asylums” will not yield Indiana’s School for Feebleminded Youth or Massachusetts’ McLean Hospital; “boarding schools” will not yield Tennessee’s Brainerd Mission School or Oklahoma’s Bloomfield Female Academy; “women’s prisons” will not yield Connecticut’s State Farm for Women or Wisconsin’s Industrial Home for Women; and “juvenile prisons” will not yield Ohio’s Opportunity Farm for Girls or Texas’ State Training School for Girls. Many terms central to this study were also unstable in their time—claimed by various actors with sometimes competing agendas, fighting to privilege or obscure specific definitions. Below, I discuss Progressive Era language surrounding three concepts central to this study: social work, prisons, and imprisoned people.

2.3.1. Social Work

This is a story about a social worker. The Progressive Era was a period of experimentation, refinement, and professionalization in social welfare. The earliest social work schools were training young adults for a career not yet defined. Schools like the New York School of Philanthropy advertised their courses as supportive of work in charities, schools, offices, prisons, public health departments, and civic organizations (Kellogg 1909). Social work, the New York School’s Director wrote, embraced “all those efforts which are consciously and deliberately undertaken in any community for the improvement of living and working conditions” (Devine 1912, p. 145). For this reason, deciding whether or not to call someone from the Progressive Era a “social worker” is a complicated task. Scholars should be careful not to overlook persons with alternative disciplinary training or without access to professional training, including many influential Black welfare workers such as educator and women’s club leader Mary McLeod Bethune and her labor organizing partner, training school superintendent Nannie Helen Burroughs (Carlton-LaNey and Hodges 2004; Michals 2015; Terrell 2023).

With this context, I situate Dr. Smith’s life and work firmly within social work history. She was the superintendent of three prisons for women and girls, a position advertised to social workers in the field’s national publication, The Survey. While carrying the privileges of a medical doctor, Dr. Smith was most active in social work societies and conferences, serving as President of the Texas Conference of Social Work, speaking at national social work gatherings, and publishing in social work journals. She worked alongside reformers like Jane Addams, Jessie Taft, and Katherine Lenroot—women whose work is often considered foundational to the field’s early identity formation.

2.3.2. Prisons

This is a story about training schools, which, despite their name, were never really schools. Like the women’s prison, the girls’ prison insisted its purposes were treatment, training, and reformation, not punishment (Lekkerkerker 1931; Rogers 1922). By imprisoning them at very young ages, reformers suggested they could prevent girls from growing into criminal women. They adopted educational rhetoric that obfuscated the penal nature of their projects. Most states named these institutions training or industrial schools, and called the women and girls held inside them “girls”, “students”, and “inmates”.

Dr. Smith ran training schools. I understand the training school for girls—and all its euphemisms—as a prison for state-assigned young women and girls. In most cases, people were sentenced to these institutions without due process. The indeterminate sentence meant most never knew when or if they would get to leave. Once there, inmates were forced to labor, made to perform gender and class norms, and subjected to abuse and exploitation. While most training schools were not enclosed with fences or gates, unauthorized departures triggered police searches (not unlike public youth shelters today). Escapees, if caught, could face punishment or a transfer to adult jails and prisons.

In this study, I use terms employed by reformers in their own time. While the language of the “training school” obscures its penal nature, it also provides a level of precision necessary for distinguishing it from its peers—the reformatory, the penitentiary, the boarding school, and the county detention home.6 And while the slippage between girls, students, and inmates is inherently stigmatizing, it also refuses the rhetorical distancing between the idea and the reality of a so-called progressive prison.

2.3.3. Imprisoned People

This is a story about gender and criminalization in the Progressive Era. At this time, adult women (ages 18 and older) were often called “girls”, especially when committed to training schools as minors. This routine infantilization in the archives can lead researchers to overestimate the number of minors in Progressive Era prisons and courts. Further compromising our ability to delimit prisoners’ ages is the overlapping ages of commitment between some training schools and reformatories. In Oregon, for example, girls up to age 17 could be sentenced to the training school and kept until age 25, while women aged 18 and older were sentenced to the reformatory. Therefore, adult women could be found in both juvenile and adult prisons.

While age restrictions in US prisons have shifted in the last century, gender classifications have remained largely unchanged. Prisons for women and girls in the Progressive Era were, in reality, prisons for people classified as women and girls. This state-sanctioned erasure of queer and trans people severely compromises our understanding of prisons. When queerness is visible in the archives, it is often signified by sexual and gendered transgressions given as reasons for commitment or discipline. In this study, I again employ the language reformers used in their time (“women and girls”), to recognize the gendered and cissexist nature of their carceral project.

This is a story about a young White woman working with White women and girls. At the turn of the century, many Southern and Central European immigrants (e.g., Greeks, Italians) were not considered White. These immigrants occupied a liminal space, facing racial discrimination while still enjoying more privileges than people considered Black, Asian, Latine, and Indigenous (Roediger 2006). In place of racial categories commonly recognized today, Progressive Era prisons often used demographic descriptors like nationality, religious affiliation, and immigration status to describe prisoners. Whether or not “colored” as a category represented Black people alone or broader groups of people considered non-White varied by state and institution.

Progressive Era Texas witnessed the continued implementation of Jim Crow laws and a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Between 1900 and 1930, Texas’ population rose steadily and its demographic changed dramatically (Buenger 2020). The proportion of Black residents declined as people fled North for safety and economic opportunity; European immigration slowed as the US imposed wartime immigration restrictions; and Mexican immigration grew significantly, owed in part to the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), agricultural development, and labor exploitation (Brown 2022; Weise 2008). As Spanish replaced German as the second most commonly spoken language, Texas passed regulations to outlaw bilingual education (Buenger 2020). The growing Mexican American population challenged the Jim Crow Black–White binary (Weise 2008). For example, the Census Bureau’s 1910 population tables counted the estimated 232,920 Mexican immigrants and descendants in Texas as “foreign whites” (U.S. Census Bureau 1913, p. 597). Like European and Asian immigrants, some fought for inclusion into the White imaginary. While sometimes enjoying privileges not afforded to their Black neighbors, Mexican Americans’ attempts to avoid the worst of Jim Crow largely failed. Both Black and Mexican American residents faced organized, extralegal violence from White mobs, and inadequately funded, segregated institutions (Buenger 2020; Weise 2008).

Texas custodial institutions largely excluded Black and Mexican American residents. A look at a Texas State Board of Control (1921) report shows the inconsistent ways these institutions classified people according to race and nationality. Texas operated separate state schools for blind and d/Deaf children along a White/“colored” binary. The State Training School for Boys and the Pasteur Institute (a branch of the State Lunatic Asylum) classified people as White, Negro, or Mexican, and the East Texas Hospital for the Insane as White or Colored. The State Tuberculosis Sanatorium and the Southwest Insane Asylum classified people by nationality and excluded Black Texans. All remaining institutions, including the Texas State Training School for Girls, provided no racial or national statistics, an indicator they may have explicitly excluded Black and Mexican Americans.

What follows is a story about Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith’s work in Texas (1915 to 1925). I begin with a brief sketch of her upbringing and education, followed by a description of her first position in a Methodist maternity home.

3. Becoming the Most Dangerous Woman in Texas

Some day, I am going to be the most dangerous woman in Texas, armed as I am, with facts on delinquency.7

—Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith, 1922

In 1885, Carrie Weaver Smith was born in Fayetteville, Georgia to Caroline Mounger Palmer, a former music teacher, and James Rembert Smith, a Methodist minister and professor at Emory College (Phillips and Friauf 2021). By age ten, both of Carrie’s parents had died of tuberculosis, leaving behind five children. She moved in with relatives, including her uncle, Judge Howard Elmore Weaver Palmer,8 before leaving for college. Carrie completed four years of coursework at LaGrange Female College in Georgia,9 a year of religious studies at the Scarritt Bible and Training School in Kansas City (Smith 1943), and finally four years of medical school at the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia—the first school to award women medical degrees (Memorial Hospital 1910; Woman’s Medical College 1911).10 She interned at the Worcester Memorial Hospital in Massachusetts,11 where she was “rejected from work in the foreign missionary field” due to her “so-called unorthodox beliefs concerning the church” (Fisher 1943, p. 42).

On 1 June 1910, 25-year-old Carrie graduated medical school (Woman’s Medical College 1911). With training in religion, medicine, and social work, she returned South to work as the House Physician for the newly opened Virginia K. Johnson Home in Dallas, Texas.12 Johnson, a Confederate-supporting Southern Methodist social worker, had created the three-story institution to save White unwed mothers and sex workers.13 Women and girls at the Johnson Home were called “inmates”, and any children born there were adopted out after six months.14

Dr. Smith quickly gained a reputation as a captivating writer and speaker, often invoking sarcasm and sensationalism. While conflict and even outrage sometimes followed, her words felt deliberate. She resented apathy, and if her unorthodox approach to the press accomplished anything, it got people’s attention. Writing for the Missionary Voice, Dr. Smith challenged readers not to condemn those sent to the Johnson Home (Smith 1913a). Christ, she argued, did not condemn “fallen women”. She closed with the following:

We have little mothers in our institution not far past thirteen, little girls who play with dolls when their babies are adopted. Do you dare call those little things fallen? They are not fallen, but felled like the trees of the forest.

At age 28, Dr. Smith’s entire life had been situated within the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Her family, her education, and now her career kept her in proximity to conservative, Protestant White women—women she believed were misinformed and hypocritical. A few months later, she published one of the most controversial writings of her career in The Survey, social work’s popular and nationally circulating journal (Figure 1) (Smith 1913b).

In “The Cry to Christ of the Daughters of Shame”, Dr. Smith juxtaposed the celebration of Christ’s crucifixion, from which followers knew he would shortly rise, with the daily condemnation and assault of women for whom redemption never came. While Christ was admired for his sacrifice, Dr. Smith argued, women were sacrificed every day for men’s lust. She had grabbed people’s attention.

Dr. Smith’s poem was reprinted in national publications like The Lancet-Clinic and The Missionary Voice, as well as local papers like California’s Marysville Appeal (Smith 1913c, 1914).15 For months, readers wrote into The Survey to condemn Dr. Smith, and at least one called for a boycott of the paper for publishing blasphemy. “All harlots are not martyrs”, a New York reader argued, “nor can we assert that a majority of them are victims of anything but their own frailty” (Knox 1914, p. 229). The Survey offered a healthy range of perspectives, a Massachusetts pastor wrote. That is, until Dr. Smith’s poem. “How can anyone, least of all a woman”, he asked, compare their actions to Christ’s atonement? (Chester 1914, p. 689). The journal should aim for “clear and helpful points of view”, a Boston woman wrote, “and the avoidance of the abnormal” (Ernst 1914, p. 453). Agnes Repplier (1914), a well-known conservative, Catholic essayist, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that Dr. Smith’s writing was not fit for publication anywhere, least of all in a journal with as “high and serious aims” as The Survey. She was obsessed with sex, Repplier argued, and her writing “smothered in sentimentality”. Editors at Illinois’ Decatur Herald agreed, accusing her of belonging to a “growing school of writers whose stock in trade is the preying upon sentimentality”.16

Having proven herself as someone who could attract readers, Dr. Smith began publishing a weekly column in the Dallas Morning News. Her essays used storytelling, sarcasm, and statistics to challenge things like child labor, infant mortality, Jim Crow politics, and war and to support reforms such as compulsory education and women’s suffrage.17 In many cases, her columns foreshadowed social and political initiatives she would later pursue, such as helping to create a Bureau of Public Information or facilitating medical inspections of school children.18

Possibly tiring of a conservative, Protestant community in a state still mourning the loss of the Civil War, Dr. Smith seemed desperate for pragmatic and progressive thought partners. After attending the 1914 National Conference of Charities and Correction, she wrote into local papers to complain about Texas’ low attendance and express her admiration for what the annual gathering offered:19

The National Conference of Charities is the most democratic, non-partisan, non-sectarian platform in the world. On its floor, the right of free speech is immutable. No creed is debated, against no race is there discrimination; no subject is expurgated on account of its unpleasant facts, provided those facts ring true. No capitalist or system is spared, no “kow-towing” or catering to money interests is tolerated.

She took aim at people who considered social workers “impractical idealists”—a charge she rejected throughout her career. Social work innovation, Dr. Smith wrote, required pragmatic experimentation, not empiricism without application. Most speakers addressed “actual work, rather than Utopian dreams of what might be”.

In 1914, Dr. Smith’s attention shifted to the juvenile legal system. She used her Dallas Morning News column to critique Texas’ approach to juvenile delinquency, including reform initiatives popular among the women’s organizations she would soon come to rely on. In one column, she wrote that despite an increase in public school facilities and the introduction of a juvenile court system, the number of Dallas youth charged with misdemeanors had increased.20 This increase, she wrote, “may be due to the desire on the part of the numerous and enthusiastic ‘probation officers’ to do their full duty and make a report that will gratify the women’s organization that is supporting the movement” (p. 12).

While many states had designed juvenile courts as civil proceedings, Texas’ were criminal proceedings. Dr. Smith questioned the construction of juvenile crime, pointing to a survey that found, when asked, many of the nation’s leaders admitted to committing crimes as youths. In an example of her use of storytelling to call out public officials, she wrote the following:

And we stop to wonder what might have been the effect on the case of Judge Blank, if the time that he took $5 from the till of his father’s grocery store to spend on circus day, he had been reported by his irate parent to the officer, had been taken to the court house, all possible testimony of stolen watermelons, apples, etc. had been given to prove to the Court, that he did not have the making of a ‘desirable citizen’ unless taken from his surroundings, and his home life and placed in a ‘reform school.’ Of course, we can wonder, but still we doubt if he would have been a Judge.

(p. 12)

Not even the Chicago juvenile court, opened by nationally renowned social welfare leaders, escaped her critique. Considered one of the best in the country, Dr. Smith argued the Court was overcrowded, with little time for judges to consider each case. Schools, psychologists, and special education teachers, she argued, should intervene before courts. “The ‘home of the brave,’” Carrie wrote, “is still fearful of the child-criminal” (p. 12).

The following week, Dr. Smith used her column to garner support for the creation of a Texas State Training School for Girls.21 She told the story of an exasperated mother taking her daughter to court for incorrigibility.22 The girl reminded the judge of his younger sister. He was conflicted. Did he reprimand the family and assign the girl a probation officer, or sentence her to jail? This “what shall I do with her?” predicament, Dr. Smith wrote, was common in Texas courtrooms because the state had no alternatives. But a state training school, she argued, could solve the judges’ dilemma. Texas agreed to allocate $25,000 to establish the institution if the public (readers) could donate an equal sum.23

Eugenicists positioned juvenile delinquency as a crisis borne from hereditary and training schools as a necessary solution. Like many of her contemporaries, Dr. Smith envisioned a more complex state apparatus. The training school could not solve the problem of hereditary criminality, the theory went, because the training school was meant to reform. Existing state custodial institutions for d/Deaf and blind youth did not capture (literally and figuratively) women and girls whose disabilities were less visible—what Dr. Smith (1915) referred to as “the menace of the feeble-minded”.24

In a 1914 address to the Texas State Conference of Charities and Correction, she asked attendees to “think of the danger to society when feeble-minded girls produce imbecile children to become a public charge”.25 “The State has no right”, she argued, “to be ‘particeps criminis’ in the undoing of its citizens, and then punish the victims of its own neglect”. At that year’s Texas State Fair, Dr. Smith created an exhibit she knew would draw attention, with signs that read:

For Sale–Damaged Goods! To be sold to the devil 2000 girls damaged by bad homes, heredity, environment. Cheap!

November, 1914, Texas proposes to start an Industrial School to renovate its damaged products by the human sympathetic method. Stockholders wanted.26

“Damaged Goods” was the name of a popular French play (later adapted for both film and novel) about a middle-class man whose lapse in judgment leads a woman to infect him, the narrative goes, with Syphilis, which he passes to his innocent daughter (Canning 2019).27 A year later, Texas opened the State Colony for the Feebleminded with 65 women and girls aged 6 to 49 (Brandenstein 2017).

By the end of 1914, Dr. Smith’s sensationalist use of the media, or perhaps her membership of the NCCC Social Hygiene Committee, had attracted the attention of the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA). The ASHA invited her to help prepare an exhibit for the 1915 San Francisco Exposition (Panama-Pacific International Exposition 1915; Smith 1943).28 She was granted a leave of absence from the Johnson Home to work with an ASHA committee in New York and study sociological conditions in different cities.29 The Exposition was a defining moment for the eugenics movement (Hudson 2010). It hosted the Second National Conference on Race Betterment, where presenters like ASHA’s Thomas D. Eliot (1915) offered eugenics as a one-size-fits-all answer to nearly every societal issue facing social workers. The ASHA and the National Race Betterment Association’s exhibits were both in the Palace of Education and Social Economy, with the latter displaying statutes, photographs, charts, and other materials on “the causes and evidences of race deterioration” and “the possibilities and methods of race betterment” (Hurley 1915, p. 1380).

Dr. Smith returned to Texas and hit the ground running. She took another leave from work to tour the Southwest giving social hygiene and sex education lectures on behalf of the Young Women’s Christian Association (Woman’s Missionary Council 1915); helped start the People’s Central Forum of Dallas to create spaces for public discussion and civic engagement;30 and worked with the Southern Sociological Congress to study social problems and public health.31

Two years earlier, the Texas State Legislature had passed House Bill 570,32 authorizing a training school for girls. Like other southern states, this progressive innovation was reserved for White girls, leaving Black girls to languish in jails and convict leasing systems designed for adult men, or the Goree State Prison Farm for Women (“Goree”). At Goree, Black women were forced to labor in fields while White and Hispanic women, housed separately, made clothes and linens (Texas State Library & Archives Commission 2016).33 Considered a burgeoning expert on the “girl problem”, Texas appointed Dr. Smith Superintendent of the State Training School for Girls in the summer of 1915 (Figure 2).34

The Training School was being built in Gainesville, a city of less than 10,000 residents (83% majority non-immigrant White, 16% Black, and four residents labeled “Indian, Chinese, or Japanese”) near the Texas–Oklahoma border (U.S. Census Bureau 1913).35 Texas law authorized juvenile courts to sentence White girls aged 9 to 18 to the Training School until age 21 or marriage.36 The Board of Control was lucky, the Houston Post wrote, “to have secured a Texas woman with such a varied and large experience in this particular line to initiate the work in Texas”. The next month, Dr. Smith embarked on a six-month cross-country tour of training schools. In her early thirties, she began a tumultuous career in juvenile prison administration.

3.1. Texas Training School for Girls

The Texas State Training School for Girls at Gainesville (hereafter referred to as “Gainesville”) was built in the middle of a US girls’ prison boom. Between 1910 and 1920 alone, states opened 23 training schools for girls, more than all four previous decades combined (Reeves 1929). As the “cottages” went up, Texans were facing a health crisis. Malaria, hookworm, typhoid, and dysentery were spreading across the state. In response, the International Health Commission, the State Health Department, and the University of Texas co-sponsored an educational series about hygiene and disease. Dr. Smith and Dr. Grace Huse, a fellow graduate of the Woman’s Medical College and Gainesville’s soon-to-be resident physician, co-facilitated community events.37

In May 1916, still months away from Gainesville’s opening, Dr. Smith addressed the San Antonio Federation of Women’s Clubs.38 She critiqued the double standard women so frequently found in the courts: girls were punished for so-called immoral behavior with men (including sexual assault victimization) while men acted with impunity. Justice, she said, looked like “a boy in Gatesville [training school] or a man in Huntsville [state prison] for every girl in the training school”. This double standard would persist. Five years later, in a report to the Texas State Board of Control, Dr. Smith (1921a) wrote:

In a majority of cases the girls who come to us at Gainesville have been victimized and used for immoral purposes by adult men, practically none of whom are ever held accountable, or, if brought to trial, are given suspended sentences or dismissed for want of corroborative evidence. Only in nine per cent [sic] of cases have prosecution of the men involved even been so much as attempted.

(pp. 119–20)

On 6 September 1916, Gainesville opened with approximately 20 staff and an equal number of inmates (Figure 3), many likely transferred from the Dallas County Girls’ Industrial Home.39 Gainesville sat on a 160-acre property with fruit orchards, brick “cottages”, a laundry room, a garage, and farmhouses (Dietzler 1922).40 Cottages were used to segregate girls according to venereal disease status and behavior. One cottage used for medical care and discipline contained rooms for operating, sterilizing, and douching; a laboratory, pharmacy, dental office, and hydrotherapy space; and six “discipline” rooms (the only rooms with locks). Cottages were built to hold 28 girls, each in individual rooms (7 × 9 × 10 feet) (Smith 1919a).41 Before the year ended, Texas judges would sentence 60 girls to Gainesville.

Three systematic studies of women and girls’ detention facilities in the 1920s highlighted Dr. Smith’s progressive approaches to the training school. In her survey of 30 prisons for women and girls, Miriam Van Waters (1922) reported that Dr. Smith had “probably gone further than anyone else in stressing the school side of the program” (p. 367). Margaret Reeves’ (1929) survey of 57 training schools for girls provides the most detailed, public account of life at Gainesville. During her 1921 visit, Reeves found cottages with a total capacity of 78 girls, each still in single rooms. Staff included a woman physician, nurse, and psychologist, a resident recreation specialist, a parole officer, a storekeeper, a stenographer, teachers, a farm supervisor, farm assistants, matrons, a laundress, and a night watchman. Of the training schools willing to share financial reports, Gainesville had the highest per-person costs for provisions.42 While Dr. Smith felt Gainesville’s vocational training was insufficient, Reeves (1929) reported it was better than most—providing training in in-home nursing, cooking, and typewriting. The average age at commitment was 15.5 and girls stayed an average of 1.5 years before parole. To explain the indeterminate sentence to newly imprisoned girls, Gainesville’s Handbook of Rules and Regulations read:43

You have been sent to the Girls’ Training School by the Court of the State of Texas and are under its care until you are twenty-one years of age. This does not mean that you will have to stay here at this school until you are twenty-one, but simply that you will be under the guidance of the Superintendent and the Board of the School and that if you make such a good record that it can be considered for your best welfare to parole or let you leave the school that you will still be subject to be returned to it at any time. You will stay at least during one school term. “Well begun is half done”.

(p. 2)

Perhaps most revealing was Mary Dietzler’s wartime survey of 43 detention homes and reformatories receiving federal funds to detain women and girls with or suspected of having venereal diseases. Dr. Smith was aware of the critiques against her, Dietzler (1922) wrote, i.e., that she was uncooperative; she used too much space for administrative purposes; she spent too much money; and she was frequently absent. Gainesville was “under the influence of modern ideals, somewhat theoretical but altogether human, with the emphasis on health and individual treatment of girls” (p. 213). Dr. Smith’s “ideals are high”, Dietzler (1922) reported, “and she intends to make the State support the modern ideas which she was authorized to study and incorporate in the school policy” (p. 213).

Dr. Smith’s confidence and uncompromising approach were undoubtedly supported by her privileges as a middle-class, White woman of prominent Southern heritage; her loyal relationships with White women’s clubs; her extensive education; and her stronghold on local press. For nearly a decade, she used these advantages to insist on creating a progressive institution, reflecting modern ideas about science, behavior, and human development. Unwilling to compromise, her tenure was marked by a series of public conflicts with state officials. In the sections that follow, I explore three refusals that led to her first termination: the refusal to accept Gainesville as a penal facility, to acquiesce to Ku Klux Klan intimidation, and to allow a state-imposed enclosure.

3.2. A School and a School Only

Will it work? […] Surely, we need not hesitate to take as final the answer “Yes”, from such authorities as Jane Addams, Graham Taylor, Katherine Davis. They are not dreamers but workers. Their conclusions were not reached in the library, but in the training school and reformatory, and extend over years of broad experience. With one accord all social workers answer “Yes”, to our query, “Will the Training School do what we expect?”

(Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith 1914, p. 15)44

From the beginning of her tenure at Gainesville, Dr. Smith fundamentally disagreed with local and state officials on the purpose of the training school. She insisted Gainesville was a school, not a prison. She was not naive. The Texas State Training School for Boys, opened in 1889, had always been classified as a correctional institution (Markham and Field 2019). State institutions were notoriously overcrowded and underfunded, and their superintendents were known to be appointed based on political favors. The invention of the juvenile court further situated training schools as holding spaces for youth convicted of crimes. While Dr. Smith had long objected to the imposition of courts on youth delinquency, they existed nonetheless and were the primary source of commitments to Gainesville. But if she could convince Texas and its taxpayers that Gainesville was a school and a school only, she could play by a different set of rules.

Dr. Smith’s expense reports did not reflect the operation costs officials expected from a prison. Gainesville’s cottage plan distributed inmates across several small buildings, each outfitted with kitchen and dining equipment and supervised by a matron. Dr. Smith insisted every girl sleep in an individual, unlocked room. This model was exponentially more expensive than the congregate system, which allowed the Training School for Boys at Gatesville to imprison more than ten times as many youth (Smith 1921a). Like most training schools, Gatesville ran on child labor (Platt 2009). Inmates were forced to produce food, clothes, laundry, and even craftwork to sustain the institution and, in some cases, turn a profit for the state. While girls at Gainesville were forced into similar types of “industrial training”,45 they did not labor at a scale that could finance the institution. Child labor, Dr. Smith believed, had no place in a school. Van Waters (1922) wrote of Gainesville,

Nothing is allowed to interfere with education. If the work of the school cannot be made educational, then the girls should not do it; let the work be ‘hired out’ is the idea apparently. So in this school men are hired to do the farm work and a large part of the laundry work while the girls engage in a scientifically balanced diet of study, work, and play.

(pp. 367–68)

The Texas Board of Control, overseeing state institutions, shared monthly expense reports showing average per capita (inmate) costs with the local press. Gainesville did not fare well. In May 1921, for example, the Dallas Morning News reported that Gainesville’s average per capita costs were the highest out of all 14 state institutions46 and nearly five times higher than those of the Training School for Boys. Lawmakers suggested cutting costs by tearing down walls to house girls under a single roof, i.e., the congregate system.47 “Such an arrangement”, Dr. Smith told the press, “would have automatically turned the girls’ training school into a prison”. The only arrangement she would consider was one that would “eliminate every feature that could characterize it as a penal institution”.48 The penal characteristics of the training school, however, could not be fully eliminated so long as the juvenile court system adjudicated the youth as criminals. “It would be far better”, she believed,49

if all juvenile cases were handled by school authorities, instead of court authorities. It would be considered absurd to ask a child to plead guilty of having contracted meningitis in an epidemic. It is equally absurd to ask a child, as it is the custom of our juvenile courts in Texas, to plead guilty to delinquency.

3.2.1. The Elimination of the Reformatory

In June 1921, Dr. Smith took her suggestions for eliminating juvenile courts and prisons to the NCCC (now called the National Conference of Social Work). In a talk she provocatively titled “The Elimination of the Reformatory”, she warned about the “blind worship of words” and the emptiness of social platitudes:

Somebody, seeing unsatisfactory social conditions, wants a remedy, honestly and earnestly thinks out a scheme, starts propaganda, gets a following, gets legislation, gets an institution, calls it by the name of the thing he fondly hopes it will accomplish, and then lapses back into satisfied self-assurance.

(Smith 1921b, p. 127)

The reformatory system, she charged, neglected children until they were “warped beyond all recognition”, and then claimed to reform them. Social workers should realize, Dr. Smith argued, that those “who come out of the reformatories better men and women would have been still better men and women if they had never been sent to an institution” in the first place (p. 129).

What would replace the reformatory? “Elimination must mean substitution” (Smith 1921b, p. 130). Dr. Smith proposed a clearing house model, whereby teachers, nurses, parents, and neighbors could make informal appeals to local “educational councils”, i.e., people trained to conduct extensive evaluations and diagnose social problems. Delinquency was a disease, she argued, and early diagnosis was essential:

Many of these children can return from the clearing house to their own homes, provided the home is kept under supervision. Snatching a child from its home is a lazy method, and often the substitute for the home is an institution where standards of care are no improvement over the home from which the child was taken.

(p. 130)

This proposal was not cheap. Communities would need friendly visitors, mothers’ pensions, domestic relations courts, and day nurseries. If councils determined that children would not succeed in the home, they would classify and assign children to the feebleminded colony, the psychopathic hospital, or the training school. “Separate the classes”, Dr. Smith said, “and you will automatically eliminate the reformatory” (Smith 1921b, p. 131). She believed the training school should be kept small and function as “a school, and a school only” (p. 131). Poking fun at the emptiness of the training school rhetoric, she told conference attendees to

… protest persistently against being a party to permitting a so-called state supported institution to prop itself on the labor of the child as a crutch. It tempts one to ask, in considering the training schools in America, ‘When is a school not a school?’50 and to answer, ‘When it is a school for delinquents’ (so-called).

(p. 131)

Attendees responded with “spontaneous and prolonged applause”, reported the Dallas Morning News.51 Martha P. Falconer (1922), a nationally renowned women’s reformatory leader, penned a response to Dr. Smith’s talk in the Christian publication, The World Tomorrow. Her suggestions, Falconer argued, were particularly intriguing coming from her position as superintendent of a girl’s reformatory “recognized as one of the best in the country” (p. 239). While Falconer agreed with many of Dr. Smith’s ideas about prevention, education, and enrichment, social workers, she argued, needed to acknowledge that some women and girls needed detention—for their own protection or society’s.

3.2.2. The Back Road

Dr. Smith’s plan to “eliminate the reformatory” was not an intellectual exercise. She would spend the next several years refining a legislative proposal and building a base of women’s and civic organizations to support it. In the meantime, she would take a sort of back road. If the legislature could not see the benefit of “a school, and a school only”, she would have to show them.

In the early 1920s, around 13% of girls’ training school superintendents had a college degree, and only 25% wanted college-educated staff (Reeves 1929). This minority included Dr. Smith. In particular, she wanted teachers with “education and culture equal to that of the teaching force in higher schools” (Smith 1921b, p. 118). She struggled to recruit qualified teachers from Texas, which she blamed on low salaries set by the legislature and an undesirable location.52 The University of Texas, she told lawmakers, would not even recommend Gainesville to their graduates because the salaries were so low. In 1923, more than one-third of her staff were from out-of-state, a fact opponents would use against her. To recruit qualified workers, she gave lectures to social work students, made public appeals to college graduates, and placed ads in local papers.53

The quality of Gainesville teachers was irrelevant, Dr. Smith figured, if they were not permitted to actually teach. In July 1921, she and training school teachers asked the local Rotary Club for support in allowing girls “the same amount of schooling as those attending public school”.54 At present, they explained, girls were limited to three hours of instruction a day, after which they were supposed to perform labor she believed was more appropriate for older, paid workers. Two weeks later, Dr. Smith testified at a special session of the House of Representatives, sharing “stereopticon slides” of the institution, and asking for appropriations to allow for regular school hours.55 When this appeared to fail, she tried a different strategy. She brought together the local school superintendent, judge, and concerned residents to propose sending girls to study at the local high school.56 The superintendent told the Gainesville Daily Register he believed most parents would oppose the idea, but he would take it to the Board. This strategy appeared to be another dead end.

Making the public see Gainesville as a school did not just require the presence of qualified teachers and full class days, but also the absence of penal discipline. Before Gainesville opened, Dr. Smith visited the Dallas County Industrial Girls Home and was appalled by their use of corporal punishment (Phillips and Friauf 2021). She told Gainesville staff to withhold privileges and use “moral suasion” in lieu of physical force (Smith 1919b). The Associated Press reported Gainesville had “no shackles or handcuffs, and no cells”.57 It took staff a while, Dr. Smith said, to come around to her philosophies on discipline. Their resistance is unsurprising, considering corporal punishment was commonplace in training schools. In Van Waters’ (1922) study of 30 prisons for women and girls, she found nearly half used flogging, most often as punishment for running away or “sex perversions” (p. 374), and two-thirds used starvation and restricted diets lasting anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Institutions were placing girls in steel cages, forcing them to take cold-water baths, giving them nausea-producing drugs, hosing their bodies with water, tying them up, shaving their heads, and depriving them of medical attention. One institution still used wooden stocks and straight jackets with padlocks.

Van Waters (1922) offered Gainesville’s alternative discipline as a model for the country. She told the story of a girl Dr. Smith had sent to a “discipline room” for allegedly smashing furniture and using broken remains for defense and attack. Van Waters’ article in The Survey featured a photo of the girl crafting something at a workbench (Figure 4). “Might be considered funny”, Dr. Smith told Van Waters, “but I figured if she wanted to smash things she had better have the proper tools” (p. 375).

On Sundays, Dr. Smith held an “open forum” where she said girls could write down any question and expect an answer (Smith 1925). She posted a framed notice telling girls they could leave sealed, uncensored letters for the Board of Control at any time. Speaking at the 1925 National Conference of Social Work, she told attendees:

We dare not penalize an act in the institution which on the outside would not be given a second thought. We let our girls whistle! Failure in future adaptation is certain if impossible standards are set up and mountains are made out of molehills.

(Smith 1925, p. 116)

While Dr. Smith was not a proponent of corporal punishment, she was, ultimately, leading a correctional institution. In January 1919, she announced a girl had died 24 h after being injured while operating a trash incinerator.58 I found no further mention of the girl’s death in newspapers or legislative reports, nor any resulting investigations. Sentenced to Gainesville against their will, girls escaped regularly. While this was not a difficult task—again, Dr. Smith refused to install locks, bars, or gates—escapees were subject to re-arrest and re-institutionalization if caught.

Dr. Smith’s insistence that Gainesville was a school and not a prison meant she demanded unprecedented appropriations. Her vision required higher salaries for teachers, more funding for food and other provisions (so girls could attend regular academic studies, not “vocational training”), and a high staff-to-inmate ratio. She disgruntled state officials from the very beginning, but their resistance rose exponentially when the second Ku Klux Klan (“Klan”) came to Texas.

3.3. Politics Adjourned

Dr. Smith’s tenure at Gainesville overlapped with the resurgence of the Klan. Unlike its more clandestine predecessor, this “second Klan” operated in daylight, published newspaper ads, organized mass events, advertised their affiliations, and openly ran for public office (Gordon 2017). The Klan put forward a political agenda that in many ways mirrored the reforms social workers championed—e.g., prohibition, dance hall regulation, film censorship, eugenics research, and women’s rights (Blee 1991; Gordon 2017). To build their base, the Klan extended their accusations of Black people as inferior, immoral, and dangerous to other communities, particularly Jews and Catholics (Blee 1991; Ehrenreich 1985; Flanagan 2007). The Klan argued Black, Jewish, and Catholic men posed a grave danger to White Protestant womanhood (Blee 1991).

The Klan’s resurgence in Texas became public in 1920 when a newly formed Houston chapter marched, in full costume, in a Confederate veterans parade.59 The Dallas Express, a Black-run newspaper, described a large Klan float decorated with three banners reading: “We were here yesterday, 1866”; “We are here today 1920”; and “We will be here forever”. Taking advantage of the sentiments and politics of Confederate veterans, the Klan’s re-establishment was a success (Chalmers 1965). Before the end of the year, new chapters formed in Humble, Beaumont, Galveston, and San Antonio (Blee 1991). In January 1921, Klan members sent the Dallas Express a threatening letter:60

We are rapidly Organizing the Famous Ku Klux Klan in this City to keep forever inviolate the Constitution & make this a white mans Country–also to Protect both Race humble and ignorant. We are Convinced that Negroes like yourself & staff are Enemies of Poor ignerant [sic] Negroes trying to incite them to Rebellion no one pays attention to it but ignorant Coons like yourself now we propose to let you do business provided you tell the truth and cut out trying to incite trouble between the Races if you Keep it up there Will be a Negro massacre now don’t think We Don’t Know you—We are here to keep Order, and much better hang Coons like you than kill thousands of ignorant Coons Don’t let Us here of any more boasting lies in your paper the Press of the Country has not taken it up yet but We have and believe us Weve been Coon hunting before–Yours for Law & Order even though it takes Death.

[capitalization and spelling in original]

It is clear local Klan members felt threatened by the Express’ reporting, likely afraid news of their vigilante violence would spread to mainstream media. “We are not agitators”, the Express responded, “But we do stand by the truth as we see it and protest against injustice, proscription and their agents with all of our power”.

The Klan’s threats to the Dallas Express marked the beginning of a two-and-a-half-year reign of terror in Texas. As chapters spread to Dallas, Wichita, Falls, Austin, El Paso, Fort Worth, and Amarillo, White mobs attacked anyone they accused of moral transgressions (Blee 1991). A particularly cruel and common form of torture was “tar and feathering”, whereby Klansmen would kidnap someone, strip them, cover them with tar, and throw or roll their body in feathers. In February 1921, a mob beat, tarred, and feathered a Houston lawyer accused of representing Black clients (Blee 1991). In April, Klansmen kidnapped and tortured a Black hotel elevator operator, branding his forehead with the letters “KKK” (Jolly and Banks 2022; Portz 2015). In May, an estimated thousand Klansmen marched in a Dallas parade.61 Leading the contingent were men carrying an American flag, a burning cross, and signs with phrases such as “White Supremacy”, “Pure Womanhood”, and “For Our Daughters”.

The Klan’s weaponization of White womanhood was strategic and ironic. Its vigilante violence was necessary, the Klan argued, to protect White women from a growing threat of sexual predation from Black, Jewish, and Catholic men. The Dallas County Citizens League, an organization formed to purge Klansmen from political offices, used the story of Beulah Johnson—a hotel maid whom Klansmen had kidnapped and tar-and-feathered in July 1921 following accusations of bigamy—to dispute the Klan’s pro-woman propaganda (Citizens’ League of Dallas 1922; Jolly and Banks 2022).62 Later that year, the Klan announced its official presence in Gainesville.63

In 1922, the Texas Klan, having gained national attention for its extralegal violence, turned its attention to politics. That year, Klan candidates would win nearly every county election (Portz 2015) and Texas’ Earle B. Mayfield would become the first Klan member elected to the US Senate (Blee 1991; Chalmers 1965). On April 8th, thousands of Klansmen gathered at the Texas State Fair in Fort Worth, where Robert L. Henry, a former representative and US Senate candidate from Waco, announced he was a proud KKK supporter and called upon “real red-blooded Americans” to rise up against immigration (B. Kennedy 2022). The next day, Dr. Smith addressed attendees of the 4th District Federation of Women’s Clubs’ Annual Convention in College Station, Texas.64 She called the Klan the “scorn of the nation” and urged Southern White women to protest “lawlessness in the name of chivalry”.65

A week later, on April 14th, Dr. Smith addressed approximately 200 delegates and visitors at the 6th District’s Annual Convention in Ranger, Texas.66 “Texas is a lawless State”, she told attendees:

… the Ku Klux Klan can never accomplish its purpose. It can’t save the soul by tarring and feathering the body, and you can’t sprout angel wings by sticking chicken feathers on the outside.

We are a sick State. We are not spending half enough money on public health. We are an ignorant State. Justice is a hit-or-miss matter with the judicial machinery of Texas. Once in a while a girl takes the law into her own hands, and when she shoots she shoots to kill, and the grand jury doesn’t presume to indict her.

We are a lawless State. When it suits us to observe the law we observe it, and when it doesn’t we violate it. You know it, and I know it, and the Ku Klux Klan knows it. One of the signs of the times is the Ku Klux Klan, but it is not possible for this organization to accomplish its purpose for the reasons I have stated.

Our homes are imperiled. An improved spirit from the inside is the only solution.

Years later, Dr. Smith reported that, after this speech, she began receiving anonymous threats.67

The following month, Gainesville became host to the largest initiation of Klansmen in the Southwest when Klan No. 151 welcomed 450 new members.68 The Dallas Morning News reported that armed Klansmen shut down the highway for the event, at which Senate candidate Mayfield spoke.69 Soon after, White Dallas women organized the Cox-Purl-Collins Woman’s Club to build political support for three Klansmen, including Shelby S. Cox, running for District Attorney, and George Purl, running for the state legislature (Mohsene 2011). Klanswoman Emma Wylie Ballard—Women’s Christian Temperance Union member, former Child Welfare Director, and juvenile court officer—opened one of the Club’s campaign rallies in Dallas that July.70 The Klanswomen and their supporters were successful. Cox and Purl were elected to office and, by 1923, Klansmen had control of local governments in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Wichita Falls (Alexander 1965).

In January 1923, Dr. Smith heard whisperings of a possible investigation into her management of Gainesville. On January, the Austin American reported that a judge in Tarrant County was demanding legislators investigate the training school and propose legislation to change its “method of administration”.71 Dr. Smith messaged state officials: “I am always grateful for any manifestation of interest on the part of the citizens and officials of Texas in this school and will welcome an investigation and appreciate constructive criticism”.72 When questioned about a potential investigation, Board of Control Chairman S. B. Cowell defended Dr. Smith’s work, saying her methods appeared to yield excellent results.73 She was a well-respected social worker, serving her third term as President of the Texas Conference of Social Welfare and growing her reputation as an expert in juvenile reform.

Anticipating an investigation, Dr. Smith likely arranged the feature story Mae Biddison Benson wrote for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in February 1923.74 “Dr. Smith believes that the primary purpose of the institution”, Benson wrote, “is to restore to the girl her faith in the dignity of human life”. Benson addressed questions about her management decisions. While some may want to put the delinquent girl “behind walls and bars and in chains”, she wrote, Dr. Smith’s approach was to “have faith in her, trust her, lead her gently through a readjustment process”.

Why did some girls run away? Escapes were rare, Benson reported, especially compared to other training schools, and usually limited to “psychopathic” girls. Was Gainesville a correctional institution? “I am not conducting a child’s prison”, Dr. Smith said; “I am conducting a girls’ training school”. Benson reported that the girls did not seem afraid or timid during her visit. “They are unrepressed; they are free; they are allowed to engage whole-heartedly in one of many occupations provided for them. And they forget that they are delinquents, that they are ostracized from society and all that”. Benson described a “nature study house” where girls collected found objects, and where Dr. Smith conducted lessons on sex hygiene. Where did girls go when they were in trouble? To a tree house filled with a gramophone, pictures, and books. Some girls, Dr. Smith said, would stay all day, and “nervous girls” could visit any time. Benson described her “novel” approaches to venereal disease. Rather than complete segregation and isolation, typical of this period, Gainesville built a clinic within a cottage so girls could rest between treatments and access the same activities as other girls.

Dr. Smith told Benson she was preparing to submit a bill to the legislature to increase funding for parole, redefine the training school for girls, and create a women’s reformatory, clearinghouse, psychopathic hospital, maternity home, and venereal disease hospital. A few days later, Senator Dan Scott McMillan proposed Senate Bill 280,75 which included all of Dr. Smith’s proposed institutions except the reformatory, and placed them under a new umbrella agency, the “Texas Institutions for the Care of Girls”. This agency would require a superintendent, tasked with overseeing all others, effectively supplanting many tasks currently under the purview of the all-male, politically appointed Board of Control.

As Dr. Smith’s bill headed to the Senate Finance Committee, newly elected Klansman George C. Purl announced plans to investigate Gainesville.76 Dallas Judge Arch C. Allen had told Purl that Dr. Smith paroled a girl to a private family and a sectarian institution without his consent. The next day, Purl called for an investigation.77 He accused Dr. Smith of being impractical, unable to manage an institution, and paroling girls without “authority of law” and “contrary to sound public policy and the welfare of the inmates” (p. 674). Purl argued:78

Dr. Smith does not understand that these girls are convicts. She thinks the people in the country ought to take care of them and treat them as equals. The girls certainly are convicts. She appears to think a great deal of the girls and treats them very kindly but they could be used to better advantage at the school than farmed out. The school has a nice farm and a nice dairy and these could be made more self-sustaining.

The legislator’s issue was not child prison labor but that Texas was not profiting from said labor. In the press, Purl accused Dr. Smith of “farming out” girls to private families and sectarian institutions without the consent of judges, parents, or the girls themselves.79 Dr. Smith denied the charges, explaining the Board of Control approved all parole decisions (as required by law) and that parolees and caretakers submitted regular reports.80

Purl would later make clear that “sectarian” meant Catholic, and specifically, the Home of the Good Shepherd (HGS) in Dallas.81 HGS was a name for private, Catholic-run reformatories across the United States, known for operating laundries with prison labor in the name of penitence. In Texas’ 1923 Klan-dominated legislature, Protestant lawmakers declared war against Catholic institutions. Klansmen spread rumors that all priests and nuns were sexual predators, practiced strange religious customs, and threatened White Anglo-Saxon supremacy. In her interviews with former Klanswomen, historian Kathleen Blee (1991) found that a powerful form of anti-Catholic propaganda in the 1920s was “escaped nun” stories. For example, Helen Jackson’s (1919) self-published memoir, Convent Cruelties, described her experiences of abuse in a Catholic convent and an HSG. The Klan sold copies of Jackson’s book at their rallies and she eventually joined Klan lecture circuits.

While the Texas Klan’s interest in HSGs was undoubtedly fueled by nativist prejudices promoting discrimination and violence against Catholics, readers should be careful not to dismiss survivors’ accounts of abuse. In their groundbreaking work, researchers from the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project (including currently and formerly incarcerated scholars) discovered that an HSG in Indianapolis predated the Indiana Women’s Prison, an institution long considered the first separate prison for women in the US (Jones and Nelson 2023). As Jackson (1919) described in her memoir, Jones and Nelson (2023) found girls (“inmates”) sent to HSGs who were given new names, pressured to convert to Catholicism, subjected to physical abuse, and forced to labor (typically in laundries) in dangerous conditions.

Dr. Smith went to the press to defend Gainesville’s parole system, including placements in Catholic institutions.82 Her objective was, when possible, to parole girls within 12 months to local institutions or to individuals and families recruited through newspaper ads and screened by parole officers for social standing, financial security, and the ability to provide girls adequate attention. Responding to Purl’s comments, the Gainesville Daily Register wrote:

Dr. Smith makes no effort to evade the assertion that she does not consider the girls convicts, and she is proud of the fact she endeavors to place the girls in homes or institutions in the hope that they will become good women and worthy citizens.

The investigation moved forward. Between 17 February and 3 March 1923, the Committee held at least four hearings.83 They called countless witnesses, including judges, attorneys, a farmer, a mayor, a pastor, a police chief, probation and parole officers, former inmates (including one who had escaped), a staff surgeon, two Board of Control members, training school staff, and Dr. Smith. In the end, 26 people went on record. One area of particular hostility was Dr. Smith’s decision to parole girls to the HGS. The Committee also conducted an unannounced visit to Gainesville.

White women, an increasingly important constituency following the 19th amendment, organized. The Dallas Joint Legislative Council, with representatives from seven women’s clubs, called the investigation politically driven and vowed to support Dr. Smith.84 Still President of the Texas Conference of Social Welfare, she declared the 1923 conference slogan: “Politics Adjourned”.85

On 6 March, the Committee released its report. They found Dr. Smith and her staff qualified, capable, and conscientious. The superintendent, they wrote, was “unquestionably a brilliant woman” who “unquestionably dominates the institution, [and] deserves general commendation for her high ideals” (p. 1658). She managed girls “by persuasion rather than by force”. They critiqued her for trying “to apply to abnormal or subnormal girls the same methods which would be proper with normal girls” and found there were insufficient barriers to prevent escapes. The Committee recommended Gainesville recruit more staff from in-state, hire an Assistant Superintendent to supervise when Dr. Smith was away, and lower costs by hiring a “business manager”, cultivating farmland, and transitioning to congregate housing. While the investigation found no evidence of malpractice, it illustrated the enormous space between Dr. Smith’s vision for the training school and the State’s expectations.

Free from legislators’ scrutiny, Dr. Smith continued advocating for SB 280. She embarked on a speaking tour, sharing her proposal with women’s clubs across the state.86 Possibly anticipating continued harassment from lawmakers, she worked to build local support for and familiarity with the training school. That summer, she invited Gainesville residents to a pageant, a concert, and several moving picture shows.87 Meanwhile, Purl successfully passed an amendment requiring her to secure consent for parole from committing judges; and the Board of Control cut her parole budget in half.

That fall, in her Presidential address at the 1923 Texas Conference of Social Work, Dr. Smith told attendees:88

Our slogan for this gathering will be that it is open to everyone regardless of race or religion. In welcoming all we will adopt the watchword of the Chinese Christians: ‘We are agreed to differ, but determined to love.’

We hope to assemble all under this common banner of social welfare and we hope to have representatives of every religion and of all races and trust that the Mexican and the negro populations will be represented at the gathering.

To the politically powerful Texas Klan, Dr. Smith likely felt like the ultimate traitor. As Blee (1991) and Gordon (2017) illustrate, the 1920s Klan had a significant female following—both formally, in semi-independent Women of the Ku Klux Klan chapters, and informally, in local committees and Klan-supporting women’s clubs. Dr. Smith was a White woman from a prominent Southern Methodist family, who defended Catholics; a descendent of Confederates who enslaved Black people in Georgia, who condemned Jim Crow; and a “child saver” working with young White girls, who refused to condone anti-Black violence in their supposed names. Despite these disappointments, she was undoubtedly insulated from Klan violence by her race, class, and social networks. Her greatest vulnerability was her job, which she repeatedly made clear she was willing to lose.

3.4. A Will, Not a Wall

Like most training schools, Gainesville was not enclosed by a fence or wall. It was surrounded by shrubbery and hedges full of roses and honeysuckles,89 which Dr. Smith considered “a great deal more effective in preventing escapes” than a wall or fence (Smith 1921a). Women and girls slept in individual rooms without bars or locks “other than the ordinary lock found in homes”, she told the Associated Press.90 While she believed the absence of a fence was one of the most important distinctions between the training school and the prison, the training school was not unguarded. By distributing girls into small buildings, each “armed” with a matron or “keeper” performing round-the-clock surveillance, the cottage model maintained much of the carceral nature of the penitentiary albeit under a cover of kindness (Dodge 2005).

In October 1923, the Board of Control granted Dr. Smith a ten-month unpaid leave of absence to pursue postgraduate training at Boston Psychopathic Hospital.91 While she was away, Governor Pat Neff appointed his private secretary, R. B. Walthall, to the Board of Control.92 In March, Gainesville’s Acting Superintendent resigned a day after meeting with the Board of Control Chairman.93 Informed of the unexpected vacancy, Dr. Smith sent word that she would leave her postgraduate studies to resume control of the training school.94 She returned on 25 March 1924, to what the Gainesville Daily Register reported was a standing ovation from inmates.95

Having spent more than four months working with like-minded social workers, psychiatrists, and doctors in the Northeast, Dr. Smith returned to Gainesville with an even stronger sense of conviction (and possibly an exit plan). That May, she invited the public to an evening of dinner and moving pictures at the training school. A reporter who attended praised her and took aim at her opponents:96

She has an intellect second to none, and an aptitude for the work she has undertaken which considers first and last the success only of her work, little reckoning the personal effect, whether it be commendation or criticism, so long as she is earnestly convinced that her course is for the best. Being a pioneer of this kind of work in Texas, Dr. Smith is broad enough to make allowance for the criticisms that come from ignorance, and having informed herself in regard to the best methods in parts of the country more advanced in such work, she has the patience to wait for vindication of her ideas. This should not be taken to mean that she fails to fight back when the institution is attacked, as it has been for the most part, for personal and political reasons.

Local papers continued to publish monthly reports on state institution costs, consistently noting Gainesville’s relatively high per capita (inmate) expenses. Dr. Smith defended the training school’s finances in the Dallas Morning News.97 She praised the Board’s transparency, believing public reports were essential for keeping the public informed and engaged. She noted that many statistics were misleading and newspapers did not contextualize costs. The Board refused to include the number of girls on parole in its per capita calculations, despite knowing the costs of clothing, travel expenses, and supervision. Perhaps more consequential, she noted the relative number of inmates at Gainesville. In May 1924, the Training School for Boys counted 650 inmates, compared to Gainesville’s 61. Comparing their per capita costs, she argued, was nonsensical. Regardless, Gainesville’s expenses were low if the State would recognize all it offered: education, boarding, recreation, clothing, and food.

Dr. Smith rejected accusations of extravagance. State law required the training school to provide “wholesome and proper” living quarters, exercise and diversion, vocational and social training, and medical services. These expectations, she argued, had never been met, let alone exceeded. She wrote:

Our children are housed comfortably, with wholesome board, furnished with the minimum clothes consistent with health and decency; given no more than the normal amount of recreation that is required under the law; given the necessary physical examination with correction of physical defects. This costs money. Does Texas begrudge this money? If so, let some hard-boiled economist stand up like a man and say where we can cut.

She criticized individuals, women’s organizations, and men’s business clubs for always suggesting “the State” take care of so-called delinquent girls. “Dear people”, she wrote, “you are the State”.

Dr. Smith met with the Board of Control, reportedly accusing them of spending “more money to protect property rights than to protect souls”.98 At the same time, seeming to feel the pressure to lower costs, she advertised “a number of vacancies” at Gainesville and called on county officials to “take advantage of the educational facilities”.99 Next, she spoke to the Texas League of Women Voters Executive Board, securing their endorsement for SB280.100 One League member quoted a recent comment about Dr. Smith from Dr. Hastings Hart of the Russell Sage Foundation: “You have the most scientific and humane woman in the United States at the head of your Texas institution for delinquent girls and you do not know it”.

A few days later, Board members visited Gainesville.101 It may have been during this visit that Dr. Smith learned about the Board’s intention to build a fence around the training school. On 7 June 1924, in an apparent protest, she told the Gainesville Daily Register she would lower the training school’s American flag for 24 h any time a girl escaped, a theatrical way to illustrate what she believed was a relatively uncommon problem.102 Gainesville’s new slogan, she declared, would be “A will, not a wall”. Less than two weeks later, she followed through, lowering the flag when two girls escaped.103 For at least eight months, the Register devoted a corner of its front page to the flag’s status.

That summer, Dr. Smith invited the public to film screenings, readings, concerts, and “negro spirituals” on the training school lawn.104 In July, she published a statement with the Associated Press that took aim at the cost of state institutions for veterans105—a risky move considering ex-Confederates were a substantial base of the Texas Klan:

Why didn’t the editors and taxpayers protest when the American Legion Sanitarium was costing Texas taxpayers $114 a month per veteran? It would have been bad politics to have done so. No one would have dared to raise his voice in protest, against the amount spent for disabled soldiers. They were veterans of a war that was ostensibly waged for the protection of “women and children”. Why can’t the public be fair enough to realize that these girls at the training school are casualties resulting from an age long war fought in a half hearted manner against vice and immorality, to the consequences of which the chief belligerents, the men, seem to be practically immune.

On 15 July, thousands of Klan members and their families gathered for a picnic in Dallas, featuring games, music, and speeches from Klan-supported candidates running in the upcoming primary.106 One of these speakers was gubernatorial candidate Judge Felix D. Robertson, who positioned himself as a strong Protestant who would enforce “traditional” values in Texas.107 Two days later, with Dallas’ Home of the Good Shepherd still under attack, Dr. Smith returned to the press, this time to defend Catholic institutions.108 Their purpose, she stated, was “to train and minister to delinquent girls of all creeds and races”. These Catholic “social workers”, she argued, were known for having a stronger dedication to juvenile reform work than their Protestant counterparts. They operated on meager budgets. Contrary to public belief, she had never met a Protestant girl sent to a House of the Good Shepherd who was turned Catholic.

In August, disregarding Dr. Smith’s complaints about their calculations, the Board of Control published another round of monthly per capita costs.109 Gainesville’s was more than four times the state average. Unphased, Dr. Smith went to Austin to request a larger budget, and additional funds to build a new sewage disposal plant and another cottage.110 By this time, she knew her chances of being reappointed for a sixth term at Gainesville were slim.

On 2 October 1924, Dr. Smith opened a letter to the editor of the Dallas Morning News with “Guilty, your honor”.111 Responding to recent criticisms from editors at the Daily News, she wrote (speaking about herself in third person):

May I also say that the superintendent of the Girls’ Training School did not make application for her soft snap in the first place, has never turned her hand for reappointment and has told the Board of Control repeatedly that they need not pussy-foot around in asking for her resignation, that she was ready to leave “at the drop of a hat, and also ready to stay until the cows come home”. In the eyes of most Texans she hereby pleads guilty of sufficient misconduct to justify the demand for her resignation. She has taken “the children’s bread, and given it to the dogs”. Instead of taking the 15-year-old girl whom Texas has allowed through her parsimony and careless disregard of human rights, to become mentally and physically maimed, and putting that girl in a cotton patch where she would contribute to her support and decrease her per capita cost, the superintendent of the Girls’ Training School has observed the law under which the school operates and put that girl in school.

She accused the editors of knowing practically nothing about Gainesville and refusing her offers to visit. If they had done this, she wrote, they would know “the inmates of the Girls’ Training School are not ‘young women,’ but children, children who need and deserve (and under the present management, so help me, God, will get it) educational advantages first of all”.

Later that month, Dr. Smith’s speech at the Texas Conference of Social Welfare made front-page headlines.112 In large font, the Austin Statesman printed: “Social worker declares such institutions as she presides over should be real schools, not prisons”. She had called to abolish every juvenile court in Texas, arguing they were “wrong in fundamental principle”. Girls needed doctors and schools, not judges and prisons. It was unacceptable that under the current system, social workers could only intervene once a youth was charged with a crime, bringing stigma upon the youth and antagonism toward the social worker. Once again, Dr. Smith offered SB 280 as a path forward. Responding to accusations of idealism, she said:113

What have we to do with ideals? My program is an ideal one. … I am here for a frank discussion of facts. Texas is the fifth largest State in the Union in point of population. Every one of the first four has from 700 to 1600 in its training school for girls. Texas has only fifty. The reason is that instead of running a business institution I am running an ideal institution.

Are our ideals practical or are they impossible? I have been repeatedly told to get down to earth. Our girls have been “down to earth”. They have groveled there. I believe in these children. We are going to have more ideals. I know how wonderfully worthwhile these children are. From church, school and citizenship should come realization of this worthwhile. None of these organizations realizes their value. … The people of Texas have robbed them of health, their education, their homes, all that a child should love. They would say keep the inmates in the institution and the income out; -build a fence and electrify it—protect the great innocent public.

On 6 November, Representative Purl and Board Member Walthall visited Gainesville to investigate its conditions.114 Walthall told the United Press he believed too many girls were being paroled, especially when the institution was not at capacity.115 While Walthall was in Gainesville, Dr. Smith was in Austin meeting with the rest of the Board to request more funding.116

Dr. Smith’s biennial report to the Board was also circulating in the press.117 While most superintendents provided simple statistical summaries, she used the report as a platform to share her philosophies and critique the State. She charged Texas with failing to supply necessary probation and truant officers needed to protect girls, making the state a national embarrassment. She criticized counties for sending young girls to jail rather than the training school, indicating that county officials were either ignorant of or blatantly ignoring state law. Her recommendations?

First, statewide agitation; second, a law which forces counties to appoint and pay probation officers just as regularly as they do any other county official; third, and probably the most important, is a public sentiment that will recognize this school as an educational institution and not a disciplinary or penal institution.

Purl demanded that the Board abolish Gainesville’s parole system and launch another investigation, alleging that Dr. Smith allowed a girl to be held in jail for weeks while on parole.118 Dr. Smith traveled to Dallas to speak with the City Federation of Women’s Clubs about the allegations.119 She argued that the state had failed to sufficiently fund Gainesville’s parole system. “The delinquent girl is not in a class by herself, but is a natural product of neglect”, she said; “She must be treated in a natural way”. Parole was necessary, she argued, because it was impossible to make an institution truly homelike. Anticipating her termination, she begged the Federation not to allow the Board to replace her with a politician. “I’m not bothered about what Texas does to me”, she said. “But I am about what you Texas women are going to do to the schools. Give the girls justice”.

A week later, Walthall announced that the Board would request $10,000 to build “a strong wire fence, ten feet in height, tipped with several layers of barbed wire at the top” around Gainesville to prevent girls from escaping and “prowlers” from entering.120 Gainesville was situated just eight miles from the Oklahoma border, which Dr. Smith admitted made escape tempting and left the state with little recourse as they could not extradite minors.121 The next day, Kate S. M. Rotan, a prominent Waco club woman and original Board of Control member,122 wrote a letter to the Waco Times-Herald.123 The money women had helped raise to open Gainesville was for a “training school for wayward girls, and not for a penitentiary”. Rotan criticized the Board for wanting to lock girls, whom she noted were “often more sinned against than sinning”, inside like criminals.

Inmates joined Rotan’s protest,124 indicating Dr. Smith may have told them about the fence debate or they may have read about it in the news—both scenarios unexpected in a Progressive Era training school. Someone sent the Associated Press a copy of their newsletter, the Happy Dump Herald. In it the girls wrote:

We are not criminals. The majority of us were committed here for minor offenses, so why must we be made to feel as though we were criminals? If they are putting up the wall to protect the public, we can see no reason for it. None of the girls of our training school have murdered anyone and they are not criminals; therefore, they should not be looked upon as a menace to society.

The average girl committed here is between the ages of 15 and 18. Who is afraid of a girl of that age? There are more girls on the outside doing worse than the girls in the school, but still no one fears them.

We are asking for the consideration and sympathy of every law-abiding citizen of Texas to look upon us as only young girls who are striving to become just as good as citizens as each of you, and with a good background, not a criminal record.

If a wall should be built around the training school, it would not only change its purpose, but the name as well. It would change it from a training school to a girl’s prison.

By 23 December, the Associated Press had declared the fence proposal a statewide controversy.125 Despite additional protests from the Gainesville Chamber of Commerce and various women’s clubs, Walthall insisted the Board move forward.126 In the Western Weekly, women’s club leader Phebe Warner challenged the Board:

Would you want to see a ten foot barbed wire fence built around our other schools where girls are being educated just because a few of them decided to break all the rules of the school and get out and run off?127

The transgressions Gainesville girls were accused of—primarily leaving the grounds to spend time with boys—were no different or more common, Warner argued, than those of college girls. If the Board was concerned about dangerous people “prowling” outside the school, the fence should be erected around them, not the girls.

In January 1924, Dr. Smith sent the Austin American-Statesman and the Times Record News a political cartoon featuring one girl behind a tall barbed-wire fence and another walking freely (Figure 5).128

The Austin American-Statesman editors weighed in on Gainesville’s identity crisis:129

It is for the legislature to decide whether the training school is to be known hereafter as a school or a penal institution. The board of control is striving to uphold the school’s reputation by preventing escapes of inmates, but to stop the escapes by the means proposed is to confess that the school is not what its name implies.

The next day, Dr. Smith arrived in Austin, preparing to testify before a House subcommittee.130 When asked if she had heard reports that she was going to resign, she reportedly said, “No, I have not. Have you? Whether I am asked to resign or not means little to me. I am now fighting for a principle”. She had prepared 14 arguments against the fence proposal, including, “If it is true that the girls are leaving the institution for immoral purposes and returning, as has been declared, the school should be closed as a nuisance and the superintendent indicted. Go to it”.

She met with the Board and the Senate Finance Committee about the biennial appropriation.131 While there, she responded to Purl and Walthall’s criticisms about parole practices. Gainesville could not hold all the girls on parole. But even if it could, Dr. Smith explained, she would not support it. Then there were allegations that she was paroling girls out-of-state. She explained this had only happened one time after a girl was tried for murdering her father “to protect other children in the family after she had suffered terribly herself”.132 “Why shouldn’t that child be given a chance to start afresh in a community as far from the scene of her tragedy as possible?” she asked. A few days later, editors at the Dallas Morning News published an editorial defending her ability to make out-of-state parole placements.133

Dr. Smith testified before the Senate Finance Committee, urging them to eliminate the fence appropriation.134 She produced a chart showing the $10,000 cost of the fence, the number of girls who had run away, and the cost of bringing each of them back.135 Pointing to the chart, she told the committee:

Here is your fence. I’ll guarantee that the interest on the investment alone will pay the cost of returning runaway girls at the training school for the next 100 years. If you know anything of human nature, you know that you will have to build it so strongly that it will be difficult to get out, lay its base in concrete and electrify it against invasion of predatory males. If I can take back to those girls a message of trust from the Senate of Texas, a fence will not be needed.

In what appeared to be clear retaliation, the committee unanimously voted to remove Gainesville’s entire appropriation.136 Committee Chairman John Davis of Dallas argued the training school was not carrying out its stated purpose and the superintendent’s budget requests were too high. The appropriations bill was now headed to the House.

Three senators issued a minority report opposing the decision, asking that full funding, minus the fence, be restored.137 The Committee did not have the authority, they argued, to defund Gainesville when the state legislature authorized its existence. Women’s clubs protested. The Dallas Women’s Political League shouted “God help John Davis” and “Goodbye, John!” as they passed a resolution against the decision.138 They accused Davis of attacking the school out of spite. “We believe in economy”, the Federation of Women’s Clubs told Times Record News, “but we do not believe in beginning with the children of Texas”.139

While many city leaders questioned Dr. Smith’s unorthodox ideas, the decision to defund Gainesville appeared to cross a line. Newspapers began to weigh in.140 The Fort Worth Record-Telegram denounced the Committee’s decision and endorsed Dr. Smith’s insistence that Gainesville was not and should not become a penal institution.141 The Dallas Morning News called the decision “an expression of petulance” and accused the Board of overstepping.142 The Fort Worth Record-Telegram wrote that “nothing but a lack of understanding as to the merits of the Training School could have prompted” the decision.143 Senators, the editors warned, were about to draw “the wrath of Texas women and other good citizens”. One of the few exceptions was the Marshall News Messenger, whose editors questioned Gainesville’s impact on female delinquency and called for a return to local, religious-based institutions.144

Meanwhile, Walthall reminded the public that Dr. Smith’s term expired in about six months and the Board had the right to terminate superintendents.145 Gainesville could lower costs, he argued, by taking in more girls and supporting a fence to deter escapes. The next day, the Fort Worth Women’s Club published a letter to the legislature denouncing the recent proposals as “archaic”.146 A few days later, overwhelmed by public disapproval, the Board tried to employ Dr. Smith’s rhetoric. They recommended Texas return delinquent girls to county-level institutions where they would no longer be “confined as though they were criminals”.147 A sentence to Gainesville, they said, carried too much stigma.

In the weeks that followed, Dr. Smith’s years of networking with committees, conferences, and public speaking arrangements paid off. At least nine women’s clubs formally protested the defunding bill.148 Gainesville’s own Cooke County Commissioners passed a resolution supporting the training school’s full appropriation.149 By February 10th, it was clear her organizing had turned the tide. The House of Representatives moved to restore Gainesville’s funding.150 Fearing opposition from the Senate, clubwomen continued to organize. Kate Rotan held a mass meeting at her home where she read a letter from Dr. Smith framing the legislators’ efforts as an insult to the Texas clubwomen who helped open Gainesville.151 Attendees made plans to collect signatures from supportive citizens. Less than a week later, the Senate unanimously voted to save Gainesville.152 Dr. Smith would have a biennial budget and no obligation to build a fence. Her celebration, however, was short-lived.

For the Good of the State

In June 1925, Dr. Smith brought her fight with Texas to the National Conference of Social Work. She titled her talk with a question, “Can the Institution Equip the Girl for Normal Social Relationships?” and followed with a series of responses beginning with “not if” (Smith 1925). Not if it made girls believe they were inherently abnormal, did not provide strong standards, and employed inexperienced and disinterested staff. Not if it failed to recognize her intrinsic worth. “In the name of childhood”, she pleaded, “let us not, through our undervaluing of the individual’s worth, complicate a simple situation by our ill-advised attempts at super-salvation” (p. 111).

Not if states classified it as a penal institution. Not if it stigmatized girls with labels like “incorrigible” or “delinquent” or denied them self-expression. Not if administrators were afraid of public criticism, unemployment, or politics. Not if it lacked patience, failed to provide healthcare, or made “an obsession of economy” (p. 114). Not if it insisted on holding girls prisoner. Not if it used restraints such as lashes, handcuffs, or straightjackets. Not if it was patronizing:

That a bunch of girls should have staged a ‘cussin’ bee’ while a missionary society was giving them a treat—and incidentally improving the occasion by pious platitudes—should not be surprising, nor should the girls be considered young ingrates. I once had occasion to thank God for such a demonstration in my school. When the shocked official reported it to me, I said to myself, ‘Thank Heavens! they still live’.

(p. 115)

Not if its educational methods were inflexible. “Girls should not be made to feel that they are out of the world”, she argued, “but rather that new worlds have been opened up for them” (p. 116). Not if it dismissed a girl’s family. “A girl needs to love a mother even though that mother be unworthy”, she wrote. “We have no more right to declare that a prostitute is of no salvage value, and that the love that she has for her child is to be ignored, than we have to disregard any of the other natural laws made by One far wiser than we are” (p. 116). Following her talk, Miriam Van Waters (1925) declared Dr. Smith’s work at Gainesville a symbol of modern approaches to juvenile delinquency.

Dr. Smith returned to Texas as the Associated Press speculated she may not be reappointed.153 A week later, Ethel Sturges Dummer, a wealthy philanthropist with whom she had communicated for years, invited her to give a talk to the Chicago League of Women Voters Forum in December.154 “What is this I hear about the politicians of Texas! Surely, surely, they cannot take such a backwards step”, Dummer wrote. “No, some way will open for a better understanding”.

On 15 July, the front page of the Gainesville Daily Register read, “Rumored That Dr. Carrie Smith Will Lose Her Office”.155 She wrote to Dummer to accept her invitation.156 “I think there is no question but that I am leaving Gainesville”, she said. “The Board of Control must get some revenue from this Institution, an occasional girl is not enough!” Walthall insisted the fence appropriation would not influence the Board’s decision.157 “Dr. Smith is an advanced thinker and I credit her with being both honest and sincere”, he told the Houston Post, “but her views and ours are so wide apart that it would seem best for the service that we secure someone else”. The next day, the Board unanimously denied her reappointment.158

She was not alone. Superintendents at the Wichita Falls State Hospital and State Training School for Boys also lost their appointments.159 It did not matter. Texas clubwomen were furious. Demanding to know why Dr. Smith was removed, they sent resolutions to the governor.160 “Claims of insubordination on account of the ‘fence episode’ and criticisms of the parole system of the school”, the clubwomen wrote, “would not be acceptable reasons for dismissal”.161 Her removal, the governor replied, was “for the best interest of the state”.

The Dallas Legislative Council of Women’s Organizations insisted the Board explain how Dr. Smith’s leadership was contrary to Board policies; share the qualifications of her replacement, Agnes Stephens; and describe what policy changes Gainesville would make.162 They were concerned that Stephens, having worked under a Superintendent at the State Training School for Boys, would bring a militaristic approach to Gainesville. Her appointment should not be confirmed, they argued, until a hearing could be held.

Eight days after her highly publicized removal, Dr. Smith sent Ethel Sturges Dummer a biography to share with the League ahead of the December talk.163 It began with the following:

My chief entitlement to ‘fame’ is that I am being dismissed for the good of the State from an Institution that I have been Superintendent of for the last 10 years. My Board of Control considers me an absolute failure and have said so in no uncertain terms.

The Denton Record-Chronicle declared that her time at Gainesville was not in vain.164 The shortness of her tenure, the editors asserted, was a consequence of her insistence on leading as a person concerned with welfare. The Dallas News and the Gainesville Daily Register published her NCSW speech in a multi-part series, prompting many readers to send letters of appreciation.165 On the last day of her term as superintendent, the Fort Worth Record-Telegram wrote:166

Dr. Smith is not a politician in that she sacrifices her own opinion in order to make her place secure. She had ideas of the right and wrong way to run the school which she headed and was willing to fight to the last for her ideas. She never gave in, not even when to stand for her principles met her severance from the State’s payroll. […] And the loss is Texas’, not Dr Smith’s. She will be able right off to obtain work in her field. Women of her caliber are sought after. But Texas, with all due respect to Dr. Smith’s successor and to other social workers of the State, is going to have a hard time replacing Dr. Smith.

That fall, she relocated to New Jersey to work for the United States Children’s Bureau studying the institutional treatment of delinquent girls (Smith 1926).167 In her new role with the Bureau, she embarked on a series of lectures (American Social Hygiene Association 1925).168 After hearing her speak at the New Jersey State Conference for Social Welfare, a Pittsburgh training school tried to recruit her as Superintendent.169 Reporting on her talks, newspapers described her former position at Gainesville without reference to the controversy that ended it. In mid-December, she traveled to Chicago to join Jane Addams in speaking to the Chicago League of Women Voters and the Joint Committee on the Care and Training of Women Offenders about female delinquency (Figure 6).170

Later in life, Dr. Smith attributed her termination from the Texas State Training School for Girls to “a row with the Ku Klux Klan”.171 In 1925, the majority of Texas congressmen were Klan members (Gordon 2017). “Eventually a prominent Klansman got into the Legislature”, she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, “and another on the State Board of Control, and they went after my scalp”.172 While she undoubtedly drew the wrath of the Klan during the height of their political control in Texas, her prison career did not end with Gainesville.

Dr. Smith became Superintendent of the Montrose Training School in Maryland and later the National Training School for Girls in Washington, D.C. Her analyses naturally evolved but her core vision stayed the same. With enough trust, authority, and state investment, she believed she could remake a prison into a school. When she was able to convince people the training school was a “school, and a school only”, their support for her political protest was resounding. Conditions that many might tolerate in a prison for young delinquents were considered outrageous in a school for wayward students. However, with her vision unchanged, social and political conflicts that defined her first superintendency resurfaced in Maryland and DC. By 1937, her career in prison reform ended with three highly publicized terminations. And presumably no regrets.

3.5. Hauntings of Reform

In “Protecting Texas’ Most Precious Resource: A History of Juvenile Justice Policy in Texas”, William Bush (2008) wrote that despite waves of reforms, critiques of Texas’ juvenile legal system followed a predictable pattern, with each decade recycling language so similar “as to be barely distinguishable”. The year before Dr. Smith died, Gainesville imprisoned 257 women and girls, a nearly 50 percent increase from the year she was terminated.173 A state investigation uncovered rampant abuse (Acuña-Gurrola 2022). Inmates were underfed, overworked, and locked in their rooms for extended periods; staff overused corporal punishment; and buildings were full of fire hazards.174 The Board of Control dismissed Agnes Stevens, the woman they hired to replace Dr. Smith in 1925.175 In the late 1940s, Texas followed a national trend, transferring control of its youth prisons to a new entity, the Texas Youth Development Council (Bush 2008; Legislative Budget Board Staff 2016). Following decades of abuse and neglect allegations, Texas passed a series of reforms in 2007, including restricting commitments to felony convictions, lowering the maximum age of confinement to 19, and closing more than half of the state’s youth prisons (Bush 2021).

In 2011, Texas reorganized youth prisons and probation departments under a new Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD). It has been nearly a century since Texas ousted Dr. Smith from Gainesville, and the TJJD’s description of its juvenile prison system is eerily similar to that of its founders:

While public safety and accountability are certainly considerations for youth, the juvenile correctional system emphasizes treatment and rehabilitation. Even when it is necessary to incarcerate youth, the setting is designed to be protective, not punitive, and the goal is to educate youth about discipline, values, and work ethics, thus guiding them toward becoming productive citizens.

Today, Gainesville is the “Gainesville State School”, a boy’s prison operating under an array of euphemisms including school, campus, and secure facility. It is surrounded by an inward-sloping barbed wire fence. In front of the fence, at the School’s entrance, is a historical marker remembering Dr. Smith as the first superintendent (Flahive 2023). It begins:

Authorized by the thirty-third Texas legislature in 1913, the Texas State Training School for Girls opened on 160 acres east of Gainesville in 1916. Initially headed by Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith, the facility offered education, agricultural and vocational skills to girls and young women…

Abuse and neglect continue. In 2019 alone, prison staff used force against Gainesville youth 659 times, or roughly 3.9 times per child (Merfish and Mitchell 2020). The TJJD terminated its five top administrators and appointed Darryl Anderson, a career superintendent with a master’s in Counseling Education, Gainesville’s new Superintendent (Kessler 2023; McGaughy 2019). Soon after, advocacy groups filed a complaint with the US Department of Justice (DOJ), alleging ongoing abuse and neglect in Texas youth prisons (Gandy et al. 2022). Authorities arrested 11 staff for sexually abusing children. The DOJ opened an investigation into allegations of abuse, excessive use of force and isolation, and inadequate mental health care. Meanwhile, the TJJD announced Shandra Carter, a licensed clinical social worker, would become its new Executive Director.

In 2023, Representative James Talarico submitted House Bill 4356 to transfer Texas’ five youth prisons to a new “Office of Youth Safety and Rehabilitation” under the Health and Human Services Commission (Flahive 2023). HB 4356 would require that by 2030, Texas close all youth prisons and in their place establish alternative, county-based services and “secure placement options”. During public comment, representatives from thirteen juvenile probation departments unanimously opposed the bill as reckless, while youth and anti-prison activists declared it a necessary step toward youth de-carceration in Texas. HB 4356 stalled in committee. Failing to challenge the fundamental logic of the prison, generations of welfare workers seem to repeat a familiar pattern: investigate, expose, research, report, rename, reinvest, repeat.

4. Discussion

Is it possible to stand for humanity in an inhumane system? The late criminologist, Stanley Cohen (1985)176, studied reforms and the progress narratives that drove them. He argued that no matter what state of social control we find ourselves in, we rationalize our work as more informed and professional than what came before. This theory of reform, sometimes called reformist reform by prison abolitionists, interprets failures (e.g., abuse, overcrowding) as natural consequences of imperfect and under-resourced systems. With more training, more money, and more research—each generation argues—it can materialize its humanitarian dream. Advocates of reformist reform seek to preserve the state infrastructure Progressive Era reformers fought so desperately for, insisting on the responsibility of the public (i.e., the State) to rehabilitate youths. They rarely question the very idea of rehabilitation or their trust in a State to identify and adjudicate youth supposedly in need of it.

Abolition challenges the logic of the prison, in all its euphemisms. Advocates of this approach reject the language of “alternatives”, which presumes that a prison system is “broken”. This theory of brokenness invites an endless stream of creative solutions, Schenwar and Law (2021) call “perfecting the prison nation”. They write:

Innovation, in itself, is no guarantee of progress. In so many cases, reform is not the building of something new. It is the re-forming of the system in its own image, using the same raw materials: white supremacy, a history of oppression, and a tool kit whose main contents are confinement, isolation, surveillance, and punishment.

(p. 17)

Rather than seeking reform, abolition calls for an end to the overlapping relationships and vested interests between the State, the elite, private organizations, and corporations maintaining mechanisms of surveillance, policing, and imprisonment. It seeks to build logics, relationships, and models today that our descendants will not need to dismantle tomorrow.

At the beginning of this study, I wanted to fit Dr. Smith into a box, hopeful she could serve as some sort of early representation of reformist or abolitionist struggle. I was hopeful that the decisions she made in the times and places she made them would leave me with a sense of clarity for my own work against the criminal legal system. Instead, the deeper I dove, the more complex she became. I am convinced that most social work ancestors would turn out to be if we did our due diligence. And while scholars often end their articles by offering implications and drawing conclusions, I will instead ask the readers—particularly those interested in challenging and changing the criminal legal system from the inside—to hold some of the tensions her story leaves me with.

Dr. Smith employed reforms that grew the size, scope, and power of Texas’ juvenile legal system. She successfully lobbied to expand Gainesville and thus its capacity to imprison more and more people. She recruited college-educated staff to implement modern and scientific methods, and she insisted on calling Gainesville a “school”—legitimizing it as a progressive institution in the eyes of reformers while it remained a correctional facility in the eyes of the state. And she advocated for a network of specialized institutions that would abolish the youth prison (in theory) while still expanding the state’s capacity to surveil, capture, and institutionalize youth.

She also employed reforms that took power and resources away from the juvenile legal system. She rejected the idea of a “criminal” youth and thus the idea that youth should be treated and adjudicated in a criminal legal system. She called to abolish the juvenile court—controversial even among her most progressive peers. Often accused of being an impractical idealist, she aspired for a system that did not (yet) exist. She warned that calling an institution a “training school” would not, on its own, separate it from the penitentiary. She shared her vision to make Gainesville a school far and wide, garnering an impressive following to help her resist legislative efforts to revoke parole, enforce child labor, instill punitive discipline practices, and erect fences. And she troubled the common sense logic that being sent to Gainesville made someone exceptionally criminal or dangerous. Dr. Smith used her visibility and position to publicize the State’s false promises, faulty logic, and contradictions. She also failed to see her own.